I still remember that first weekly Bible verse that I taught to my fourth graders at the Christian school where I taught. I put it to a beat so that it would be memorable, and I remember telling them...
"My goal is that you would learn these verses, not just for your Bible test on Friday but for the rest of your lives."
The next week, I added motions and a beat again, this time to 2 Timothy 3:16-17.
After that, I started looking up verse songs on YouTube. I stumbled upon Mr. Pike, a fellow Christian school teacher in California who used the same curriculum and put his songs to music. We learned Deuteronomy 31:6 from JumpStart3 and Hebrews 11:1 from His Sheep Am I and Matthew 28:19 from Seeds Family Worship. If the songs weren't in the NIV 2011 translation, I would adapt them so the songs would match the verses word-for-word. If there weren't songs, I would write them! I even had two students volunteer to write two of our verse songs.
At the end of the year, I ended up moving to fifth grade with this same class, and the process of finding/adapting/writing verse songs began all over again. At the end of that year, we "tested" ourselves by sitting down in front of a videocamera with the references to over 100 verse songs we had learned. And...together...we were able to sing them all from memory! They are well on their way to remembering these verses as adults.
The next year, I stayed in fifth grade and had originally thought that I might work on one grade level of verses every year until I had playlists of verse songs for K-8. But then I became inspired to just do them all that year. It felt like a "legacy project" -- something that could outlive me and go beyond the four walls of my own little classroom. The term "legacy" didn't seem to fit very well because legacy seems to imply something that remains after you are gone, and I planned on staying at my school for years (decades, even!). It was very much a "sweet spot" position, and the school was in my neighborhood (my polling place!). I appreciated this after commuting 30 minutes both ways for four years. What I had no way of foreseeing back at the beginning of the schoolyear when I embarked on this "legacy project" was that the year would end with a pandemic sending us virtual in March and the out-of-nowhere decision to quit my job to homeschool our boys.
So, this project really did outlive my time at my beloved school. I finished the final songs this fall, and I hope they help many students (and adults) to hide these verses in their hearts, not just for a test, but for the rest of their lives.
I wanted to post the links to these playlists because I don't have another way of keeping them all in one place. I have many, many playlists on YouTube, and these can get lost in the shuffle. Most of the verses are in NIV 2011, but some of the younger students memorize in other translations, too. I've tried to indicate the translation in the titles. Hopefully, other teachers/parents/students who use the same curriculum will stumble upon these songs, just as I did with Mr. Pike's:
(many Scripture songs learned in this little classroom!)
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