September 19th, 2012 by Kristi Stephens

If you missed last week’s post about verse memory, I shared some ideas on how we were memorizing Scripture using mega blocks and clothespins.

This week, I wanted to try something more kinetic with the kids, especially since it was raining all morning and they needed to move!

After writing out this week’s memory verses on index cards with a sharpie, we journeyed on down to the icky basement (which for some reason is always completely exciting to our kiddos – they aren’t usually allowed down there, instantly giving it the irresistible draw of the forbidden.) I used some masking tape to mark out a hopscotch area, and then ran out of masking tape and finished it off with electrical tape. It wasn’t very pretty, but hey, it worked. And it kinda matched the “shabby chic” feel of the floor. Somewhere the chic was lost, though…

After laying out a card on each square, everyone (Mom included) jumped their way through the verse a few times, hopscotch style, saying the words of the verse as we went.

After they had had some practice, we pulled out the exciting twist and started to take away words. This would have been the ideal time to have a pretty hand-crafted Pinterest beanbag (I did save that pin with the owl beanbags on my sewing board…). Bereft of adorable nocturnal beanbags, however, I opted for the less-glamorous sock ball. The kids threw the sock ball and whichever block in landed on (or near), we took the word away. Then they hopped through again, saying all of the words of the verse including the missing one.

We repeated this (over and over and over again), until all the words were taken away.

This was a huge hit – so simple, but they loved it! It was interesting to watch AG obviously visualizing the words that were no longer there as she jumped through the blank boxes – sometimes it helps tremendously to get those black and white words off of the page and put some movement with the learning!

This would be easy and fun to do in a Sunday School classroom or outside with chalk – just don’t forget to have the words written on something that can be removed.

Enjoy!