Welcome to my Home Bible School Blog!

A place for updates, tips, first hand experience, insights, seasonal inspiration, crafts, and other such content.

Welcome to my Home Bible School blog. In the spirit of the back-to-school season, I thought I would start with a short post sharing how we make home Bible school a part of our back to school season in our home. Home Bible school started when our oldest first entered school, so back to school marks the anniversary of my first ever home Bible school curriculum building project. I’ll never forget that experience of first venturing into the world of hunting, vetting, collecting lists, following links, reading reviews, searching some more, giving up, and starting over until I had a list of books, ideas, topics, and schedules that seemed like it was worth actually trying out.

It was all exciting but also definitely confusing and overwhelming—especially at the very beginning. All of those feels is a large part of why I started this website. It didn’t seem like it had to be that hard. This year, to commemorate the first of all my book and resource searches, I’ve been hunting for the perfect suite of books to add to our collection to flesh out our resources a bit more and to reignite an excitement around home Bible school—there’s nothing like a fresh, new book full of beautiful illustrations to curl up with on the couch (at least in our family). 

This Year's Hunt

This year I’ve decided to add roughly one book per category to our bookshelves—so one scripture-for-kids book, one book on theology, one book on history, one (or maybe more…) story books, one Bible story retelling type of book, one chapter book, etc. It’s so easy to nickel and dime myself to a surprise in my shopping cart. So, I challenge myself to write down my whole list and then streamline it. Some I flag for future seasons, etc. And if I can find books at a library or a used bookstore, I’ll go that route too. (Watch for future posts on how I hunt for good titles.)

Here's what I ended up with on my list: (watch for reviews on these to come out in the following months!)

• What Am I Feeling by Dr. Josh and Christi Straub

• Count Yourself Calm by Eliza Huie

• Psalms for Young Children by Marie-Helene Delval

• Thinking About God by Alex Early

• Augustine of Hippo: The Doubter Who Became a Church Father by Joshua D. Chatraw

• I Can't Believe My Eyes by Joshua Cooley (ChristianBook.com has this one on super sale right now!)

• Jesus Moments: Esther: Finding Jesus in the Story of Esther by Alison Mitchell

Oh, and I found these at libraries to use too:

• Jesus and the Gift of Friendship by Trillia Newbell (This one was at St. Louis Public Library!)

• God Made All of Me by Justin and Lindsey Holcomb

(If you can't tell, I've been developing a topic unit on emotional health. Stay tuned for that to roll out in the next year.)

Making it Fun

Something else I decided to try was to include home Bible school in our back to school shopping adventure. I picked out a few items we could use to organize and plan our content this year (things like composition notebooks, post it tabs, new craft supplies, stickers, a bin to keep it all in, etc.) and created a home Bible school back-to-school list. So, when we went shopping, we shopped for home Bible school too. To be honest, this snuck up on me a bit, so my list was meager this year, but it gives me an opportunity for growth next year, and it was still fun to get a few supplies! (Watch for future posts with  more details on how I organize and structure our materials and schedule.)

For now, enjoy the back to school season! And happy book shopping! Hopefully our 6 collections will serve as inspiration of what you might like to add to your shelves. Our first 8 week curriculum is also now available on our curricula page as well, if you want a more complete suite of coordinated recommendations and structure.