Experimenting with telling stories to children

My children, currently 9, 7 and 3, have grown up on a diet of home devotional, Sunday school and school scripture Bible stories, Colin Buchanan songs. My children have devoured Bible picture books, Bible comics and Bible stories on You-tube. But at the beginning of the year, I realised that good old fashioned Bible telling may be worth a look.

What do I mean by good old fashioned Bible telling? What I mean is finding a story in the Bible and learning it so that it is as close to the original as it can be, but sometimes using your own words and explanations when necessary. There are many philosophies when it comes to Bible Storytelling. On one side some people are adamant that only the text of the Bible is used (and by text, they usually mean the King James), and on the other hand some people think you should decorate and dramatise the text as much as possible to make it more accessible and easy for people to relate to.

Personally, I think the Bible stories are structured in a certain concise way for a reason and are powerful in their simplicity. I’ve experienced this myself and heard amazing stories from people all over the world who present God to people with just the humble words of the Bible. But I almost went the other way than people sometimes do, I thought the simple Bible stories would only be good for adults and they actually needed to be changed quite a bit for children. So, I decided to test this theory out and stick to just the text of the Bible as closely as I could.

I decided to learn Genesis chapter 3 first to tell my two eldest. (I find chapters 1 and 2 difficult to tell as stories and we had done Genesis 1 for home-schooling at the beginning of the year.) When my children were younger they all took turns at being restless and wandering all over the place as we read Bible storybooks, but recently they are getting better at focusing. Still, I was wondering about how a whole chapter would go. It was interesting. The good thing about Bible telling is that you are looking at your audience. You can respond to their facial expressions and body language and tell when something doesn’t quite make sense. Also, I’m always surprised by humour that comes out when telling the stories that sometimes you don’t pick up even when just reading aloud. So, yes, the boys drifted at times but I was able to look at them and say their names to bring them back into the story, or just lean in towards them and tell them the story.

The whole thing worked so well. My boys were more engaged than even reading one of their preferred Bible Story Books and I could see they were emotionally and intellectually responding to the story. It was definitely easier than reading the text Bible Study style, which we sometimes try and do.

I really liked what came after the story had finished. The boys asked questions and I asked them to think about the answers themselves. They did and came up with really good ideas. I also went to Romans 5:18 and 19 and read it to them. That made them think.

I’ve done a few other stories with them and another method I have is to print out the story and tell it to them, only glancing down to keep myself on track. This way is good, but not as good as learning the story, internalising it first and then presenting it. Learning stories and telling them has been great for me and my children. One thing I’ve found is that my children can retell the story extremely accurately only once after they’ve heard it from me.

To learn more about how to prepare a Bible story click here.

Thank you to MB for submitting this post.