Picture this: You have a group full of attentive, adorable children in your Children’s Church class. They are rapt with attention while you give your lesson. You are on a roll. Everything is going great, until…
You say, “Please turn to John 3:16 in you Bibles.”
Annnnd then you waste 15 minutes trying to help all of the children find John.
“Is it in the Old Testament?”
“Where is the New Testament?”
“Is it one John, two John, or three John?”
“Big number three or little number three?”
“My Bible just has pictures!”
I HATE waiting for children to find things in their Bibles. It drives me CRAZY.
Enter: Sword drills.
Since we started doing sword drills (and going through every book of the Bible, but more on that later), the children have actually been able to FIND things in the Bible– Quickly!
And they have a lot of fun.
So what are sword drills?
Sword drills refers to the Bible as being the “Sword of the Spirit” (Ephesians 6:17). It is basically a race to find a verse in the Bible.
There are a few different ways to play, so we will go through the original sword drill, and then talk through different ways to play.
How to play:
- Have Bible verses written on piece of paper. Put them into a jar or a box.
- Pull out a verse.
- Students race to see who can find the verse first
- The first person there wins a point! (I also have them read it out loud)
That’s pretty much it. Keep score and see who wins– you can even give the winner a small prize.
Sword drills are super simple, but the are fun and they are effective.
Variations on Sword Drills
There are plenty of ways that you can change up sword drills to meet your needs, or just so that they are a little bit different.
Here are a few ideas:
Write it down
Once students find the verse they are looking for, you can have them write it down on a piece of paper. Writing will help them to remember the verse better. This is really great if you have a theme, like verses about love or verses about fear.
This is also really great if you are at home and only have one kiddo, not a group.
Time it
Speaking of being at home with one kid, you can time their progress. Keep a consistent deck of verses, and time how long it takes your kid to find one or all of them. You can try again on another day and keep track of their progress!
Go Digital
If you are a teacher, parent, or human, you know that education has gone DIGITAL– especially after the Coronavirus shutdown that was 2020.
As a teacher, it’s been crazy. We basically had to make a completely different curriculum overnight.
Anyway, that led me to finding Boom Cards, which are probably the greatest things ever. It is a website with interactive lessons and games and flashcards– seriously, check it out.
Anyway, I created some sword drills on Boom Learning. It has the reference (John 3:16), and then two different verses. You click on the correct one– which means you either need to know it or be able to find it! Boom Learning includes different sounds and colors and it feels like a game.
You can try out this deck for free by clicking here.
Memorize it
If you have students memorize a new verse each week, you can add them to your deck of Sword Drills. Instead of having students look them up, they can memorize them.
So when you pull out John 3:16, they have to recite it.
This makes if much more difficult as time goes on, because they will have more and more verses to memorize. But just think about how many verses they will know!
Can you think of other ways to use Sword Drills? Have you ever used them before? Let us know in the comments!
And don’t forget to pick up you first set of Sword Drills for FREE, by clicking here!
Happy teaching!
Becca
