Hide it in your Heart

We tried something new last night...I remember from my former life as a campus minister as a fun way to memorize scripture.  Basically, you write a verse on a white board and say it through a few times and then start to erase one or two words at a time, saying the whole verse after each time you erase. You keep doing this until you have nothing on the white board and you've memorized the verse!  I thought this might be fun for Ella so I made some modifications and we tried it out last night.  Here's what we did...

1. Picked a verse that was pretty simple and had a relevant moral for Ella and also for Chris and me (Ephesians 4:29- "Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths but only what is helpful...that it may benefit those who listen")

2.Wrote out the words on the white board.

3. Underlined each word. This is helpful because when you erase you still see the blank and know where you are in the verse and you can't miss a word that way.

4.Talked through each word/phrase with Ella to make sure we knew what they meant.  This was the most important teaching time of the whole exercise but she saw it as the precursor to getting to "play the game" so was excited to talk it through.  Much better than a lecture on how you should use kind words.

5.We picked certain notable words to draw a little picture next to as extra reminders. 

For example, in this verse we drew a tongue sticking out next to "unwholesome" to remind us it meant "yucky" (not sure that's how the Apostle Paul would have defined it but it worked well to explain it to Ella).  Chris drew a man crawling out of a hole for the phrase "out of" and we did a few others like an ear for "listen."

 6.We started the game! We read/said the verse outloud together and then started erasing words (but left the pictures).  In literally 10 minutes, Ella knew the verse!  And we reviewed it this morning and she said it almost perfectly when I told her the first word!  Love it!