The slogan of Classical Academic Press is “Classical Subjects Creatively Taught,” and they’ve certainly done their best to maintain that attitude. Whether it’s teaching Latin or Greek through songs or writing a logic text that’s actually educational and entertaining, they take the terror and drudgery out of important but often neglected subjects. In their new Bible curriculum for elementary students they approach the Bible not as a series of disconnected stories, but as one continuous story, forming a coherent and foundational narrative of God and His people.

How Do These Work?

Claire Larsen writes from a traditional Reformed perspective, outlining the story of God’s covenant. The course consists of two books covering the Old Testament and two for the New Testament. Each book covers one school year in thirty-two weekly lessons, and both sets are designed for students between about grades 2-6. You can spend as much time on each lesson as you deem fit, though one-hour segments two days a week is adequate (less time on more days would be better to memorize passages)

Each chapter follows the same basic format. There is a story and accompanying Bible passage to read, verses to memorize, lesson review, important facts, written exercises, and a chapter quiz. This is more or less a student-directed course, though there is an accompanying teacher guide for each text providing answers to all written exercises on reduced student pages and including some supplemental material which would be quite helpful for most parents.

The student texts are friendly, with little b&w animated characters, fun exercises and engaging and accessible stories. Exercises include fill-in-the-blank, word searches, true/false, etc. Students will likely not need much guidance, though someone will need to listen to them recite memory verses, and you will likely want to discuss the principles they’re learning with your students. The MP3 audio files (unnecessary if you are working directly with your kids, or if they read fluently on their own) contain all the readings in the student texts. The teacher's guides are not 100% necessary, but do add a fair amount of context, as do the Timeline & Map Sets, which provide interactive timelines and all the maps you'd need for these OT and NT studies.

Our Honest Opinion:

This course is easy to implement, without a lot of unnecessary frills but with enough interesting information and exercises to keep most kids’ attention. This is straight Bible curriculum without a lot of doctrinal issues, though those aren’t entirely avoided. When they are dealt with, it is from a Reformed perspective. The narrative approach to the story of the Bible (an increasingly popular approach in Bible curricula) is both fun for kids and provides an excellent foundation for Bible knowledge. This is a very good choice for an elementary or early middle school Bible survey.

Review by C. Hollis Crossman
C. Hollis Crossman used to be a child. Now he's a husband and father who loves church, good food, and weird stuff. He might be a mythical creature, but he's definitely not a centaur. Read more of his reviews here.