Whether it’s an all-age service and you have a difficult, non-narrative passage which the vicar wants read in full, a Bible study with some unwilling children or telling the story at your regular Sunday group, wouldn’t it be great if reading of God’s Word was the most engaging part of the session? So here are some ideas for adding variety into the reading of the Bible passage.
Fill in the missing words
If you are reading aloud and people are reading along in their Bibles, leave a pause and get everyone to shout out the missing word. Or in smaller settings, print the passage out, but leave certain words blank. Mix these words up and print them at the bottom of the page. Challenge everyone to put the right word in the right blank space.
Spot the difference
Similar to ‘Fill in the missing word’, but instead of leaving gaps you put in a different word. For example, ‘Jesus went to the other side of the supermarket’. Everyone should try to spot the wrong word and shouts out the correct one: ‘lake’! The funnier the better.
Buzz words
Before you begin the reading, ask everyone to watch out for words that appear several times in the passage. When they hear it, they have to perform an action or keep count of how many time that word appears.
Divide it up
When you have some confident readers, read round a verse each, split it according to dialogue and narration, or odd verses or even verses.
Use pictures or props
As someone reads the passage, display pictures of the story or, when the passage is not narrative you could, like the ‘Fill in the missing words’ method above, use a picture or prop to help people to fill in the missing word. For example, miss out the word ‘angel’ and hold up a picture of an angel so that people call out the word.
Act it out
As one person reads, another person directs a few children at the front to mime the action in the story (if unrehearsed) or you can prep some people to act it out beforehand. You could even give them some dialogue if you’re feeling ambitious. You could get everybody else to join in with acting the part of a crowd or army etc. You could also use puppets to do this, such as shadow puppets. In smaller settings you could use toys or models to act it out.
Promenade
Set up some scenes or objects in different locations around the space and tell a bit of the story at each station, getting the group to walk with you from scene to scene.
Ashley Nichols is Children’s Minister at St James, Muswell Hill.
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