by Joyce K Ellis

At the kindergarten open house, Greg’s teacher greeted me warmly. “Mrs. Ellis, I’ve been so eager to meet you.”

“Oh?” I must have sounded a bit apprehensive.

“There’s nothing wrong,” she assured me. “It’s just that Greg is so bright —”

My posture improved.

“— and we get so tickled by some of the things he comes up with.”

I smiled.

Then she told me about the day they tested the students’ reading skills. She was surprised that he could read anything she gave him. After calling in the reading specialist, she kept sticking harder books in front of him, but Greg could read them all.

Finally, the reading specialist asked him where he learned to read like that. She mentioned Sesame Street.

“We don’t watch Sesame Street,” he said. “I learned to read from my mom’s Bible.”

“Your mom’s Bible?” the teacher asked. “Really? All those big words?”

As if it made all the difference in the world, Greg replied, “Well, it’s the New International Version.”

Love of reading

We laughed. But it was typical of our precocious firstborn.

He received a natural affinity for reading from his father, a lifelong avid reader. I, on the other hand, was a painfully slow reader as a child. But because I felt I missed so much, I took a rapid-reading course when the opportunity came. That intensified my beliefs about the importance of reading. I had a lot of catching up to do, and soon reading became a delight for me as well.

Investment

At our house we consider books an investment, not an expense. And reading together became one of our favorite pastimes. It seemed natural when our children wanted to learn to read for themselves.

I am aware that some say more harm than good comes from teaching preschoolers to read. They believe kids form bad habits that are hard to correct later. But with careful and enthusiastic teaching, children who learn to read early find a whole new world open to them.

Desire to learn

Greg had an intense desire to learn. He grew up to the sound of clicking keyboard keys because I worked from home. So by the time he was two, he was nagging me to teach him the letters he saw there. I made a point of taking a few minutes to teach him whenever he asked.

In Greg’s favorite Bible story book, each story began with a large capital letter, so he would try to guess the letters there too.

Teaching children

One day during my quiet time, I was reading from the New International Version. Greg climbed next to me and stared at the page. “I wanna practice my letters,” he said.

How could I deny him? It seemed only fitting.

We didn’t have any reading primers, and I hadn’t been happy with the reading skills books we found at the library. Besides, weren’t there fewer problems teaching values in the “olden days” when the Bible was the only primer available? So what a great privilege it would be to ground our children’s reading skills in the Scriptures!

After all, the Lord commands parents to weave His Word into the fabric of everyday life:

“These words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up” (Deuteronomy 6:6, 7, NKJV).

Adventure

So, side by side, the adventure began. We started bridging the gap between keyboard letters and actual reading. In the afternoons, while his younger sister was napping, Greg and I would cuddle on the sofa and do a little word hunting in various Bible passages.

He was about three then, so at first we looked for simple words he could easily sound out, then made flash cards for a “game” we played later. God, Lord, Jesus, and Christ were some of the first words Greg learned to read.

Progress

When he mastered the sounds assigned to each letter, and through flash cards learned to recognize little words, we couldn’t stop him. Greg would sound out everything — not just words during our sit-down sessions but words on cereal boxes, street signs, and drive-in restaurant menus. Before long, there were few things Greg couldn’t read.

That kept us alert too.

The next step was to tackle a whole passage of Scripture, anywhere from three to twelve verses at a time. John 14:1-6 proved to be an excellent starter passage. Many of the words in the NIV are simple, and there is a lot of word repetition. John 1:1-5; 6:9-11; 9:1-12; and 10:7-15 are also good as next steps.

Individual learning

I’m not saying that every child will learn, or has to learn, so quickly, or that this method is superior. In fact, our second child took her time with the whole process. That didn’t bother me. She was showing her own individual strengths, learning basic phonics at school. Then at home, we used the Bible primer method to fortify those lessons.

Our third child, by age three, basically followed in the steps of our son.

But with each child we have found great fringe benefits. We had the fun of teaching our children how to read, and we were introducing them to a primer that grew with them. All three, now grown, love the Lord, and their strong reading skills have been great assets in college and career.

Sure Word

We have seen the value and power of reading Scripture proven in so many ways beyond our family as well. For example, when my friend Lois was a Bible school teacher, she saw that one of her fourth-grade pupils was handicapped by poor reading skills. Lois visited the home weekly and listened to the child read the Bible school Scripture portion aloud several times. At the end of one semester, the girl’s reading handicap completely disappeared.

God has given us this promise: “So shall My word be that goes forth from My mouth; it shall not return to Me void, but it shall accomplish what I please, and it shall prosper in the thing for which I sent it” (Isaiah 55:11).

Who knows what things God could accomplish in young lives if we would get back to the Bible primer?

Scripture quotations are taken from the New King James Version.

Joyce K. Ellis is an award-winning author who has published hundreds of articles and eighteen books, including Our Heart Psalms, The 500 Hats of a Modern-Day Woman, and a picture book for children, The Fabulous World That God Made. She and her husband live in suburban Minneapolis. Contact her through her website: https://www.joycekellis.com/.