I’m just back from a church weekend where we learnt the whole of Psalm 16 by heart. I’m now practising it every day to try and get it firm in my mind. I am not finding it easy. But that’s partly because my adult brain isn’t used to memorising stuff, and is protesting at the strain. However, children do learn things – poems at school, the words of pop songs, lines for a Christmas play. So this is the ideal time for them to be memorising key verses from God’s Word.
Most children’s teaching material will include some memory verses, and may also give suggestions for how to teach them. But we can quickly get locked in to using the same few techniques – the ones we think “work”.
A few years ago I was sent a copy of a memory-verse book that had been developed for use in a local church. Often, material developed for a specific church or group is tightly tailored to that one situation, and not, therefore, flexible enough for wider use. But this book was brilliant. I’ve been teaching memory verses for decades, but even so came across masses of ideas I’d never seen before.
We were delighted to publish the book as part of our CLICK resource range. Remember, Remember has a huge range of ideas that will suit any situation. They’re divided into different types of activity, ranging from ideas that need no equipment up to approaches that involve creating special visual aids. And there’s a fantastic table at the back that shows which age-group each suggestion is suitable for, so you can be confident you’ve chosen an idea that will work with your group.
One game I got from Remember, Remember is called “Squeak, piggy, squeak”. The children all sit facing the front, with the memory verse written where they can all see it. You choose a child to come and stand at the front, with their back to the rest of the group. Then silently point to another child, who reads out the memory verse in the highest, squeakiest voice they can manage. The child at the front then tries to guess whose voice it is. The 5-7s I’ve used this with love it – and they’re learning the verse along the way. Brilliant!
I really love this book, and the fact that it works alongside whatever material you use. I hope you’ll find it as helpful as I have.
Alison Mitchell is a Senior Editor at The Good Book Company, where she has worked on a range of products including Bible-reading notes for children and families, and the Christianity Explored range of resources. She is the bestselling author of The Christmas Promise and the award-winning Jesus and the Lions' Den.
