Walking with Jesus: Noah Plan Bible and Reading program

Biblical Principle Approach is big on reasoning, especially reasoning from God’s word. It can be a challenge to a home educating mom who was not taught this way. One resource to consider to help you on this journey is Walking with Jesus.

This is designed for fourth grade, but I believe a fifth or even sixth grader could glean a lot. It is a softcover book with beautiful Biblical illustrations sprinkled throughout. It comes with a teacher CD that breaks the year down into 4 nine week quarters, which of course you can modify to fit your home’s needs. I recommend the CD because it has the weekly lesson plans and also printable graphic organizers, which are used often in this book.

It is divided into four quarters: 1) The Immediacy of Christ, 2) Old Testament History, 3) Wisdom Literature and Prophecy and 4) New Testament History. At about $40 for the book and teacher CD, is affordable for most home educators.

Here’s how it works: your child reads the lesson, which will introduce a passage of scripture to read. After reading the scripture, there are several resoning questions to answer. Sometimes there are charts to make, organizers to complete and interpret or paraggraphs to write. There is always reasoning at the end of the lesson, that is, they interpret and glean form God’s word for themselves. No one in interpreting. There are no answers on the teacher CD. See sample pages of the book and teacher’s CD here.

Pros:

• Planned weekly lessons give structure but freedom to do your own thing.
• Teaching reasoning with a template is very helpful.
• It improves comprehension and personal application of God’s Word.
• It is not consumable, so it can be reused with your other children.
• They practice map work and study skills.
• It fosters Christian scholarship, which your kids may or may not like.
• It is a notebook method resource, so your child creates their own Bible notebook to refer to.

Cons:

• They require the NIV Adventure Bible, so if you don’t like that Bible you don’t want this resource.
• It requires an investment on the teacher’s part. It’s not a totally independent resource.

This is actually one of my favorite resources from the Foundation for American Christian Education. My daughter used this in fourth grade and we took a two year plan with it. She balked sometimes because it required a lot of thinking on her part. I insisted because I believed so much in it and I was impressed by her reasoning the longer she stayed with it.

Written by Anna-Marie, Biblical Principled Mom