new child training and discipleship tool…

A few weeks ago I came across a giveaway for the Child Training Bible(CTB) kit. I was immediately interested because I must admit I am always looking for biblical parenting books and I’m often disappointed because while they may point to scripture they are still written with the author’s bias and opinion. The kit that Mindy has put together is excellent. It includes laminated cardstock with the key and three double sided laminated sheets that list the applicable verses on the front as well as heart questions and prayer prompts on the back. I received our kit in just a few days from placing my order and wanted to get right to work at putting our together.

Putting together the CTB requires just a few supplies, the CTB kit, a 6×9 inch Bible (translation is your choice), post-it flags in 7 different colors (to correspont with the CTB key) and 7 matching highlighters (I used colored pencils to avoid bleeding through the pages).

[pinit]We chose the Illustrated Study Bible for Kids (HCSB) because it is a translation that the children can understand with little explanation, it is hard-covered, fit the CTB perfectly, and had some neat reference pages that would be helpful to the children when they’re looking stuff up. Another plus was that while the pages are a thin stock they aren’t the onion skin pages of most editions, so hopefully they’ll withstand lots of thumbing through by us and our children.

Verses that are applicable to the character traits are clearly listed out for you on the front of the reference cards.

You go through subject by subject and highlight them in your Bible with the coordinating color and then place the post-it flag in the position indicated by the key.

It took me about 5 hours to fully complete it.

Going through all the verses was really rewarding for me too. I added a few extras as I came across them too and tabbed them accordingly. Having this all set to go is encouraging in itself. Implementing it should be straight-forward since the detective work is now done and we can quickly turn to the verses we need. I like being able to show the children right in God’s word the “whys” of why we do or do not do certain things.

I used double-sided tape to add the key to the cardstock page in front of the Bible.

We will keep this out and within reach instead of on a shelf. My hope is that we won’t need to use this as much for correction as it will be teaching the children that scripture is timeless and God has already spoken of the things we struggle with today.

Now I totally want to do the same to my personal Bible for the keywords most applicable for me. I’d love to have a help-meet’s reference Bible!