Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.
-Proverbs 22:7

One of my biggest cautions when we began homeschooling, was that I wanted to make sure Bible time didn’t turn into just another subject. You see, when students take school breaks, sick days and eventually graduate, school subjects cease. Some people may go on to study a topic at their own leisure, but most adults do not. If Bible is only a class in the school day, and not a regular part of our every-day life, then I’m teaching my children that they can stop learning Scripture when the school week, year and career is finished.

On the other hand, I saw homeschool as a wonderful opportunity to do some more structured Bible learning. Afterall, we are already at the table together doing everything else, why not study the Bible too? Because of this dilemma, we hold two different Bible times in our home. One is more of a daily devotional time where we read and learn Scripture together every day (I’ll write a different post about this later), the other is what we incorporate into our morning basket, which only happens on school days.

Our morning basket started off as reading a short story from a children’s Bible, singing a song and praying for family members. It really was more of a “Bible basket” since we didn’t cover any other topics. Now, our morning basket covers much more including clock practice, Latin, read a-louds, and Scripture Memory.

My husband and I are pretty particular when it comes to learning Scripture. Too many children are taught standalone verses without knowing their context (ever hear any one take Philippians 4:13 or 4:19 out of context?). We wanted our children to learn verses for a lifetime and to know larger passages to better understand their context. We are also particular on using the KJV. Unfortunately, there weren’t many ready-made resources for us to use. So, we decided to create our own!

Our Scripture Memory Plan is divided into 5 levels. In levels 1-2, each week corresponds to a letter of the alphabet, but in level 3 we drop the alphabet correspondence to focus more on the scripture reference. Each new level introduces another verse to lengthen the passage. Levels 3-5 introduce context notes that students need to know too. This probably all sounds confusing (it was hard to write in a concise way), but below I’ll give an example to show what I mean.

Level 1 Week 1: A – Actions (Proverbs 20:11)
Level 2 Week 1: A – Actions (Proverbs 20:11-12)
Level 3 Week 1: Proverbs 20:9-12 plus the author of Proverbs
Level 4 Week 1: Proverbs 20:8-12 plus the author and theme of Proverbs
Level 5 Week 1: Proverbs 20:8-13 plus the author, theme, and key points of the chapter

As you can see, each year we are really going over the same passage, just adding on more information as we go up in levels. And a new school year doesn’t necessarily mean a new level. Level 1, for example, is taught from kindergarten to grade 2. Level 5 won’t be reached until grade 11. Since we school year-round, we normally make it through the alphabet one and a half times before the school year is ended. That’s a lot of review of these verses!

By the time our children are in high school (levels 4 and 5) they should know levels 1-3 very, very well. Our hope is that they will always know these passages and will be able to recall them to memory whenever they need to as adults. Is this necessarily better than or superior to learning lots of individual verses? No. I think that all Scripture is good Scripture to memorize, so long as it’s not taken out of context. This is just what works for us and is the way we chose to teach our children.

Have you been looking for a similar plan? You can definitely create your own, but if you’re short on time, I have our levels 1 and 2 available for purchase here as printable downloads on Teacher Pay Teacher. There’s also a free corresponding teacher guide that gives different games and songs to help the students learn the verses. (The free guide is available for everyone, so feel free to grab one even if you don’t purchase the downloads!) If you already have a Scripture memory plan that you follow, I’d love to hear about it in the comments below!