Old Testament Overview from GrapeVine Studies

While travelling around Australia, we listened to the Bible on the long stretches in the car. Starting at Genesis, we listened to short passages of the Bible then discussed what we had heard. So when the opportunity came along for us to review a couple of products from Grapevine Studies, we were really excited. We received an ebook version of the Old Testament 1: Creation to Jacob Level 1, Old Testament 1: Creation to Jacob Level 2 and Old Testament 1: Creation to Jacob Level 3 as well as the Teacher Manuals for Grades 1-2 and Grades 3-4.

The Old Testament course is made up of 12 weekly lessons or 45 daily lessons in which your children will learn about the chronological order the characters and important events that happened from Creation to Jacob.

This course also uses easy stick figure drawings as well as special colours to teach the word of God. As well as needing the internet and paper to print out our ebooks, we also needed coloured pencils (purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, brown and black), and a Bible.

As the teacher, you will read and discuss the day’s passage with your children while they listen and draw the lesson with stick figures. Each weekly lesson includes a review of the part of the timeline they are up to, review of the previous Bible memory verse, drawing activities for the next passage of Bible verses, lesson review questions, the next memory verse and a student drawing page where they can draw their favourite part of the lesson. Each level getting slightly more in depth than the previous one with more Scripture reading, memorisation and study skills added.

Level 1 is recommended for ages 6-8 (Grades 1 and 2), Level 2 for ages 8-10 (grades 3 and 4), Level 3 is for ages 10-13 (Grades 5 and 6). Our youngest boy turned 9 during the review period, so he started with using level 1 but found it a little easy, so he moved onto level 2. Our oldest boy is 11 and he found level 3 was quite good for him.

How did we go?

Lesson 1 is a basic overview of the timeline for all the 12 lessons and from our listening in the car, our boys were able to recall a lot of the events and the order they happened, which was fantastic. We completed this lesson in one day.

Then we went onto the more in-depth lessons. These lessons we completed over a couple of days. The first day, we completed the first page of the lesson, the Timeline review and the memory verse review. The second day we read the passage and completed the stick figure drawings, the third day we completed the lesson review by writing the answers to the questions and memorising the memory verse and then the fourth day, we completed the student drawing page. I found our boys were able to learn more if we took our time. This also gave them time to memorise the memory verse, by practicing over the day. This meant we spent about 15 minutes per day, usually in the morning completing the lesson and then another 10-15 minutes during the afternoon reviewing the memory verse.

Overall, we really love this program! It was easy to use and kept our boys interested in learning. They really enjoyed drawing the stick figures, even our boy who hates drawing, loved this. It has also helped our boys understand the chronological order of the events in the Bible and with drawing the eyes on the timeline pages, they now understand that the Old Testament is always looking forward, looking to Jesus.

Once we have fully completed this program, I will definitely be looking into more of the lessons available from GrapeVine. I think it is important for our boys to read and learn more about the Bible and these lessons make is so much fun they remember everything they have learnt.

If you are looking for other Bible Studies, check out the options available at GrapeVine.