Invite your students to perform this Nativity Play (script included) for Christmas.

The Religion Teacher | Catholic Religious Education

Bible Activities for Kids

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Bible Activities for Kids

This collection of Bible activities for kids will help you lead your students into an encounter with Christ through the written Word of God.

First, we want to familiarize young people with the Bible as a book. We want them to feel comfortable opening it, navigating it, and reading it.

Then we want to help them prayerful connect with Christ through his Word. This calls for more than just printable word searches and mazes. Our goal should be to help them make personal connections between what they read and what is going on in their lives. As much as possible, we want our kids to recognize how ancient Scripture is relevant and meaningful to their lives today.

I hope the resources collected here will help you give your students an experience of God’s love through meditation and prayerful reading of the Bible.

Bible Activities & Crafts

There are a lot of websites with really creative crafts and activity ideas for younger children. Here are some good collections of Bible activity ideas from popular websites:

Activities to Introduce Kids to the Bible

One of the first goals we should have as religious educators is to help our students navigate the Bible. We should be able to say, “go to John 3:16 in your bibles” and expect our kids to find the page without asking for a page number.

This article will help: “4 Ways to Help Students Learn the Books of the Bible.”

Also, this video explains a simple way to teach young people how to find a verse in the Bible:

The key is to teach the students to use the table of contents in their Bibles to find the page number of the books. From there they can flip ahead to the correct chapter and verse in each book.

A Bible Scavenger Hunt

Bible Scavenger Hunt

To help your students learn how to navigate the Bible, have them go on a Bible scavenger hunt. Give them a random list of books in the Bible, plus chapters and verses and have them find the page number. (Make sure they use the same edition of the Bible.)

You can also download and use the Bible Scavenger Hunt Worksheet I created to use at the beginning of each year here:

Lectio Divina Activities

The best way to teach children to read the Bible is to teach them how to do Lectio Divina. Don’t let the Latin word scare you. Lectio Divina simply means Sacred Reading. It is a practice of reading the Bible prayerfully. The process is pretty simple and it follows five basic steps:

  1. Read
  2. Meditate
  3. Pray
  4. Contemplate
  5. Act

Watch this video explanation to understand and guide young people through each of these steps:

If we truly want young people to encounter Christ while reading the Bible, then we must help them make those second and third essential steps. Help them ask what Christ is saying to them at this very moment while reading God’s word (meditation). Then, invite them to respond to God in prayer. This makes reading the Bible more like a conversation than a consumption of information.

Here are a few resources to help lead your students in Lectio Divina:

Bible Skits & Plays

My students love planning and performing skits in class. The big benefit of doing this is that it encourages the students to really learn the details of the stories in the Bible. The challenge we have as religious educators is to help them make personal connections to the details in these stories after the performances. Make sure you discuss the stories with the students and help them see themselves in the stories.

Here are a few skits and scripts you can download and use in class:

Bible Worksheets

Here are some of the Bible worksheets you will find here at The Religion Teacher:

You can also access hundreds of other Bible worksheets about specific stories and verses in the Bible including worksheets for every Gospel reading throughout the year as a member of The Religion Teacher.

Learn more about accessing these worksheets as a member here.

About Jared Dees

Jared Dees is the creator of The Religion Teacher and the author of 31 Days to Becoming a Better Religious Educator, Beatitales, Christ in the Classroom, and The Gospel According to Video Games.

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