Earlier this year I set us the ambitious task of memorizing Matthew Chapter 5 as part of our Morning Basket Time.
Having grown up Protestant, my fist inclination was to search for a song. The scripture songs I memorized as a kid are still with me and I can still recite 1 John 4:7-8 because of the Psalty Song.
So naturally, I began my search on YouTube for Beatitude songs. I found some fun ones, but they weren’t really working for us as far as actually memorizing the verses went.
In my search, I stumbled across an amazing resource by Bible Buffet which uses the trick of pairing words to pictures to help you memorize lengthy passages. This guy has put together an amazing resource and we worked our way through his videos with a decent amount of success.
But we hit a snag when we tried to review it. I’ve found that depending on YouTube during morning time is not always a good idea at our house. Kids tune out, or we get distracted by other videos, or the technology doesn’t work for some stupid reason. I wanted to print the pictures used in Bible Buffet’s videos so that we could review them quickly and easily.
I did actually contact the channel’s owner to ask if he had the pictures on file. Sadly, he does not.
I told my kids I was going to put together pictures to help us review the Beatitudes and I asked them if they wanted me to use the original pictures (Bible Buffet suggested I could do screen shots of the images), or if they wanted me to create new pictures. They voted new pictures.
I believe one of the reasons the original pictures didn’t stick for us is because one face blurred into another. The images were 100% appropriate and captured the tone of the scripture passages perfectly. But they weren’t exactly memorable. In my version, the images are all clip art. They may even seem irreverent to you in some cases, but the idea is to use memorable pictures, and even a bit of humor, to cement the words into your brain.
I created slides in Google Presentation that you can view and print and use at home. You can also just pull them up on your computer and scroll through the slides. One set has the words with each picture, and the second set has just the pictures. Start with the words, and when you feel confident, move to just the picture cues until you can do it from memory with no cues.
You want to work on about 3 beatitudes at a time – don’t try and do them all at once. I highly recommend watching the Bible Buffet video above to get an idea of the process of memorizing this way.
We have now used this process for memorizing the Similes of Salt and Light. It was fast, easy, and fun. I am forever grateful to Bible Buffet for his videos that taught me to memorize scripture this way!
Here are the slides!
