Module 1 planning for 7 year old

Hi there! I just finished Ancient Egypt with my 7 year old. We kept with the schedule listed in the guide, but I adapted it to better suit our needs.

First of all, we used <span style=”text-decoration: underline;”>The Child’s Story Bible</span> (Vos) for all of the Bible readings and I did not do either of the commentaries. Since we’ll be going through this module again in 7th grade I figured I would save the “heavier” stuff until then. It took a while at the beginning of each term to find the corresponding entries in the Vos Bible, but it was worth it in the end to be able to just open and go. Some readings were shorter, some readings were longer, and some days I just skipped the Bible reading that was scheduled if I couldn’t find a corresponding Vos entry.

For geography, we followed along and did one visit every Thursday.

For history I split the Friday reading in half and would read part on Thursday after geography and read the rest on Friday. Also, towards the end of the year (once we finished <span style=”text-decoration: underline;”>Boy of the Pyramids</span>) I stopped using <span style=”text-decoration: underline;”>Ancient Egypt and Her Neighbors</span> and we just read living picture books on Egypt.

I hope this helps!

I’m trying to think back, but I don’t think there was a HUGE connection between the Bible and the history readings – I don’t think you’d have a problem getting out of sync. One other thing you could do is continue the Bible all five days – spread the M-W readings over all five days of the week to possibly make it more manageable for narration.

Is this your child’s first experience with narration? This year was a first for us, but I realized that we had been narrating all of our other reading by just discussing it afterwards! At age 7, I was asking for a SHORT summary of what we read (maybe 30 seconds to a minute), and not expecting my daughter to remember every single detail.  Sometimes I would get a longer re-telling of what we read, and sometimes it would be a short “this happened, then this, then this, the end.” Also, sometimes I had her draw her narration! When she drew her narration of Moses and the burning bush, it was so interesting to see what she picked up from the reading! After she was finished, I had her tell me about the drawing and then I transcribed what she said onto the back of her drawing. Another fun way to narrate was to video her so she could see and hear herself afterward! My goal for her introduction to narration was to make it fun and natural, so she wouldn’t just sit and stress and listen for specific things to narrate. I wanted her to focus more on what she was hearing and learning, and take it more to heart, than to try and gather a checklist of things to tell me when I asked her to narrate.

One of the things I’ve had to learn is to trust the method – I’m only 2 years in, but I have seen tremendous growth in my daughter’s narrations! I’ve also had to grow myself, and have learned not to expect perfect recollection from the readings. That was a hard one for me – I’m something of a perfectionist, haha!

Again, I recommend using the Vos Children’s Story Bible for easing into narrations. Maybe use Vos during school for narrations, and read the same passage in the ESV later in the day for family devotional reading? That way you’d still have exposure to the ESV, but narrations would be (hopefully) easier from Vos.

I personally think it is ideal to read directly from God’s word.  My 6-year-old is getting the main ideas of all the Bible stories in Bible class on Sundays and Wednesday, but they rarely read directly from the Bible.  I really wanted that for our home.  A translation like ESV is so great for a young child!  Several people on this forum have told me not to expect Bible narrations for another few years.  Focus on getting great narrations from other subjects.  That helped take some of the load off me!