Being me, I couldn't stick with the curriculum.
Instead of just telling stories, we read through much of Genesis. Then we skipped along the surface of Numbers and Deuteronomy, dipped in for Joshua, and PLUNGED in for Judges. After all, I had boys in this class. And what's more exciting to a boy then reading the book of Judges? Especially the left handed swordsman and the guts coming out. :-P By that time we were behind (no, really?), so I was only able to touch Samuel, Saul, David, Solomon, and Rehoboam before having to pull out and go to the New.
But since I had started reading and really THINKING about what I was reading so that I could read and explain and dramatize it for the kids, since I had started with creation and had worked my way up, and since I didn't get to spend hardly ANY time on David (which was just a shame), I decided to spend some time in Kings and Chronicles in my personal devotions over the summer.
It was such a blessing!
And now I've been reading Isaiah, with the full background of the time in which he was writing and the time preceding then. I repeat, a blessing!
I no longer teach at that school, but if there was only one thing I gleaned from that year (and of course there is much more than one) I know I gained a lot from teaching Bible to those kids. Because I actually had to think about what I was reading. I had to make it come alive to the kids, and in the process, the Bible came alive to me!
There is something to be said for reading the Bible chronologically and understanding the history. You start to see a pattern of who God is through how He interacts with His people.
You can tell we're created in God's image. We are feeling beings. We change. We feel frustration and imploring and anger and vicious love that will do anything to protect those we love and resignation and joy. We reason, we make statements, we beg, we pronounce, we promise, we talk. SO DOES GOD. God is so much higher of course. He is authority. And He can keep His promises without fear of circumstances subverting intentions. He does not beg because He's powerless like we sometimes do but because He cares and wants a heart response. More like wooing. He is sovereign and can decide fate. And He is perfectly just, which we aren't. He's consistently loving and faithful. It is in His nature to be faithful.
In our terms, He's a person. In His terms, we are in God's image. (On a finite, created level, and now imperfect/corrupted level.)
God is ridiculously faithful.
And human beings are ridiculously unfaithful.
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