Anyone Use, or Looked into Bible Road Trip? 3 year Survey of the Blble?

I just peeked. It is an interesting idea, the Bible survey, but a bit too complicated/detailed for me.  When I looked at the scheduled under FAQ, my eyes went ?. Forty minutes for grades 1-3, 2-2.5 hours for grades 10-12. It did say you may not want to do everything, but that time frame doesn’t work for me or CM short lessons.  Just my 2 cents from a brief peek.

I too spent a lot of time exploring the Bible Road Trip website earlier this summer when I was searching for something to use for bible during this upcoming year.  I was very impressed by its thoroughness and how everything is so well planned out.  The lessons and readings come directly from the bible which I love.  It has plans for using things we enjoy such as the What’s in the Bible DVDs and historical fiction. The notebook pages are beautiful AND it was possible to use it for FREE!

BUT…. once I started to try to see how we would actually implement it on a week-to-week basis I was immediately overwhelmed.  I would have had students in three different age groups.  There was no way we could/would use all the notebooking pages so I would have to go into each file for each week for each age group and pick the ones we wanted to use and print them.  I felt the activities for the various age groups were a little advanced and way too time consuming.  I also found the teachers manual overwhelming.  The activities for different age groups where on different pages and it take a lot of planning each and every week.  Don’t get me wrong I think the activities are excellent, but I was simply looking for a resource to spend 20-30 minutes on each day – I was NOT looking for a curriculum that was going to consume so much time and energy.  Nevertheless, I was still considering how I could pare it down to make it fit for our needs.  Then I came across the FAQ that missceegee mentioned and I immediately knew I had to find something else.  There was just no way I could pare this down to the 20-30 minutes a day I was looking for!

When I really thought about it I realized that what I was really drawn to was the fact that the curriculum covered the entire bible in a systematic way, rather than snapshots of bible verses like most devotional books do, or in a haphazard way like so many bible curriculum do.  I wanted my kids to have encountered and discussed the entire bible.  While I wanted them to know the basic stories and parables it was even more important to me that they learn that the bible is a bigger story of God’s people and His redemptive plan for us.

I began searching for other curriculum that would provide this.  Honestly, I didn’t find very much at all.  The only other curriculum I found was Foundations Bible Curriculum (http://foundationspress.com/our-homeschool-curriculum/foundations-bible-foundations/)  I ended up purchasing the second book (through CurrClick) in the series (Gospel and Acts).  They recommend starting with book 1, but we had already covered the old testament over the past couple of years using the The Story Bible (VOS) so we skipped to book 2.  Compared to Bible Road Trip it isn’t very pretty, but it is very simple!  I just printed the ~90 page pdf and bound it – this took about 10 minutes.  My kids will each have small binders that they will add to about once a week.  Other than that everyone just needs their own bibles.  When I look at the curriculum I realize I could have just probably come up with my own ideas, but I would probably make it more complicated if I did it on my own 🙁  We will continue doing our own verses for scripture memory and we will skip any activity that seems like busy work, but otherwise I think we will follow it pretty much as written.  In book 1 of the curriculum (which we skipped) the books of the bible are memorized.  We started that several years ago, but it went to the wayside.  I will add memorizing the books of the bible to our scripture memory time.  (Note that the first book of Foundations Bible Curriculum covers the entire Old Testament.  Only certain selections of the Old Testament are read out loud by mom.  There is a reading plan for older kids to follow so that the entire Old Testament is read during the year.)

Anyways, all this to say that I encourage you to figure out why you are drawn to the Bible Road Trip in the first place.  Knowing what it is you are looking for will help you decide what to do.   Perhaps you can successfully pare it down to what you are looking for.  Or perhaps you will need to look at something else.  Just be careful about trying to do much or you will just feel guilty about not completing it all!

Blessings!