The Scripture Lady loves creating Bible review games! Here is one called “Inside My Concordance” to teach kids how to use a concordance.
Remember the fun game you played as a kid that started out something like this…”I’m going to Grandma’s house and inside my suitcase I’m going to pack my teddy bear.” The next child would have to continue this line of thinking by remembering what the last person packed and then add his own item into the suitcase. The list of items got longer and longer and it became harder and harder to remember the list. Therefore, the first person to forget what came next was out and the game started all over again. I loved that game! But my memory was a lot better then than it is now. However, your kids’ memory is probably sharp as tacks. So why not test their memory skills in two great ways? One will use a concordance and the other will use the wonderful Bible verse of John 1:1 – “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
Bible review games will help your children learn God’s Word in a fun way and for this one you will need to do the following:
Make alphabet letter cards on index cards for all the major beginning letters of words found in your concordance. Place all these letters in a bucket or bag out of which your kids will pick. After each letter is picked, be sure you display the letters in the order they were pulled somewhere in the room. I always display mine on a pocket chart. You will also want to have a rendering of John 1:1 as written above. You will want to take the time to recite this verse several times so that your kids can memorize it quickly. You also might want to write it on a board and erase some of the words so that they have a few words to prompt their memory of how it goes. You will need a scorekeeper for this game and you will need at least one concordance.
Here’s how to play:
Divide your class into 2 teams. Begin by saying the following:
John 1:1 says this: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Wow! The Word of God must be very important if it was in the beginning of time just like God. In fact, this Bible verse says that “the Word was God.” If this is true, which of course it is, we should do our best at knowing God’s Word and studying it the rest of our lives. One of the best tools that we can use to study the Bible is the concordance. A concordance gives us the most important words in the Bible in alphabetical order just like a dictionary. So, if we wanted to look up the word “heaven” in the concordance, we would find the “H” words. We would then search until we found the word “heaven” and then we would see several Bible verses that contained the word “heaven” and where they are found in the Bible.
Let’s play a fun game called “Inside My Concordance”. I will give the first team a chance to come up and pick a letter out of my bag here. Let’s say you pick the letter “L”. You must then look for a word in the concordance that begins with that letter. Let’s say you found the word “love”. You would then say, “Inside my concordance, I found some love.” The next student from the second team will come and pick a new letter and go through the same process, but he will have to add onto the other words already mentioned. As the list gets longer, it will be harder to remember.
If you mess up, you can redeem yourself by reciting John 1:1 correctly. If you do, you will earn 100 points for your team and the game continues with the same list. If you are not successful at reciting John 1:1, the other team gets the points and a new list of concordance words should be started. The team with the most points wins.
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I feel conflicted about teaching kids how to use a Concordance. At one time, I think it was a very valuable tool, but I never use one any more. If I am look for a passwage containing a keyword, I use BibleGateway.com or the Bible app on my Blackberry. What do you think?