Family Worship as our first Homeschool Routine
One thing I am big on is routine. From the time my kids were little and especially when I had three kids under three, I used the establishment of routines as a coping mechanism 🙂 When the kids started nursery and school, we continued these routines with modifications.
Two years ago, my husband and I decided to include family worship and Bible reading into our daily routine. The table below shows the components of our family worship time.
When the kids returned from school, and after showers and snacks, we did a bit of Bible reading along with a bible “curriculum” that we had borrowed from our children’s church ministry.
Initially, we started with “The Big Picture Story Bible” by David Helm which was a nice, introductory bible for little children. We went through this book several times and then moved on to “The Jesus Storybook Bible” by Sally Lloyd-Jones. After this, we transitioned to “The Biggest Story” by Kevin DeYoung which gives a nice overview of the entire story of the Bible. Currently, we are going through “The Child’s Story Bible” by Catherine F. Vos. This is probably the most grown-up bible we have used with the kids and I can see us using it for a few more years.
Soon afterwards, we introduced a catechism to our routine using a lovely book by Carine Mackenzie. It is biblically sound and comes highly recommended. There are over 100 questions in it and the answers are usually short, clear and easy for the kids to learn. When I’m teaching, I usually ask the kids a question from the book (for e.g. Why did God make you?) and repeat the answer three times with them (To glorify him and enjoy him x3). We do lots of revision to make sure they don’t forget and only move on to the next question once they have memorised the ones before.
Later we started singing (and trying to memorise) one hymn a month during family worship. One of the challenges of this has been hymn selection because my husband and I have so many favourite hymns and we find it difficult to choose! We tried to sing two hymns during worship time, one hymn is a new hymn that we were learning to memorise, and the other is a review of an old one that we had already memorised.
Sometimes we also did a bit of scripture memorisation based on the study we were doing in our Bible curriculum. I intend to make a plan for scripture memorisation later on and will blog about it soon. We ended our time with prayer requests from everyone.
It was, by God’s undeserved grace, a big success in our family. The combination of a consistent routine and bible teaching was slowly starting to shape our days. I saw my children thrive under this teaching and they soaked up all the bible stories and lessons.
Fast forward 2 years… since Bible reading was already established as a routine, we simply switched the family worship time from the evening to the morning. There was no better way to start our morning! During the pandemic when the kids were at home, it eventually became the spine of our homeschool routine and our Morning Time together (read “Morning Time” by Cindy Rollins).
I added more elements to it later on and will discuss that in my next post.
