Book Review: How to Study Your Bible for Kids

Title: How to Study Your Bible for Kids

Author: Kay Arthur and Janna Arndt

Publisher: Harvest House

Date: 2001

ISBN: 978-0-7369-0362-2

Length: 190 pages

Illustrations: line drawings by Steve Bjorkman

Quote: “To my husband, Jerry: Thank you for all those long hours of designing our puzzles and mazes.”

As with some of Kay Arthur’s other “inductive Bible study” books, what some will love and some will hate are the same thing: This book is for people who still enjoy puzzles, cartoons, a silly story line, and a writer’s “voice” addressed to a fourth or fifth grade level, and who are capable of reading and thinking on a college level. This book is for “Vacation Bible School” students who will be flattered, not frustrated, when this book asks them to print words like “dissipation” on dotted lines. This book is for people who are comfortable with a kids’ “detective agency” based in a tree fort tracking down words through Greek lexicons. If you know a child like that, run don’t walk.

There are children for whom church, Sunday School, and Vacation Bible School attendance become routines by the time they’re in the middle grades. They yawn, they fidget, they answer every searching question about what the lesson means to you with “Can we send out for pizza now?” A season in my life when a college friend and I prayed and agonized over ways to enliven the Piaget-sanctioned, totally age-appropriate lessons ended with a bump, for me, when one of the mothers sailed in to demonstrate that what really motivated her child to give serious answers to familiar questions were trinkets. This was during the period when “Loewens, the World’s Most Unusual Toy Store” imported collectible trinkets of every kind for just one or two dollars each, and this lady was bringing in a bag and handing out a trinket every time a kid gave a serious answer. Well, that was the stimulus to which those kids had been conditioned to respond, all right. Piaget would have approved, as would Pavlov. And who could resist any excuse to go to Loewens? (A student at an overpriced church college, that’s who.) But I have wondered, ever since I discovered some of Kay Arthur’s books, whether throwing a real intellectual challenge at those kids might have directed their attention to something…not yet spiritual, since middle school children don’t have much of a “spirituality circuit” in their brains yet, but at least more educational than adding trinkets to their collections. Maybe bringing in a magnifying glass, flinging it on the table like a gauntlet—“Who wants to read the first Greek word from the small-scale reprint from Vine’s?”—would have got those sharp little brains focussed on, at least, learning words. Hey, one of my schoolmates had a sweet, bored grandmother who lived in town, who actually spoke Greek....if we could have bribed her to come in, now that would have…

For some children, it wouldn’t have meant anything special. For the kind of sixth grade student I was, and the kind I gave up trying to teach because I couldn’t afford to buy complete collections of designer erasers for all of them, it would probably have been a real treat to have Greek vocabulary thrown at us.

Do not buy this book for your students if it intimidates you. The main Greek word Arthur asks students to track down through reference works, in this book, is hamartia. Arthur reprints a thorough list of where it’s used in the Bible and how it’s translated (basically it means sin) but expects you to know that Americans taking New Testament Greek in college usually say “hah mahr TEE ah,” and Greeks say something similar, only with adorable accents that make it sound completely different. If you’re one of those people whose blood pressure goes up at the sight of something every idjit with a four-year degree in Religious Studies knows, and you don’t, because you had to take a course that would be useful on a job, etc., etc., Kay Arthur’s books are not for you.

If you’re one of those people whose eyes light up at the sight of something you couldn’t afford to study in college, because you had to concentrate on accounting or physical therapy or even just a trade school course, but now you can go back and learn that kind of thing out of books…then you will like Kay Arthur’s books and want to collect them all, but please be careful about how you press these books into students’ hands.

But if your students are painfully familiar with Piaget-approved “Bible Stories for Children,” have already been baptized or confirmed as teen members of the church, and are starting to regret this as they think about all the game time they’re now losing to Sunday School, buy all these books that come your way: they’re worth their weight in gold.