Learning the Book of Jonah together

For our 2022 spring semester, we memorized the book of Jonah together.  The previous year, we learned verses from the SwordGrip program from Scripture Memory Fellowship to earn a scholarship to Scripture Memory camp. Since we were unable to attend camp the summer of 2022, I selected Jonah for several reasons:

• it was a whole book of the Bible!
• it was do-able in about 5 months (48 verses, averaging 1-2 per week)
• it was a familiar story but with less-than-familiar parts (like how the book ends with Jonah being angry when the people repent)
• I prefer memorizing whole passages/chapters/books instead of topical verses out of context

As with all our memory work, we incorporated songs. I adapted what I could find, but there aren't a lot of Scripture songs for the book of Jonah.  I also created some of my own tunes and used some existing tunes, such as Somewhere Over the Rainbow.

Over time, the boys got a little tired of reviewing all the verses we had learned so far.  And actually, we haven't reviewed much since we did our live recitation on YouTube in May.  Learning new verses is so much more fun (in my opinion) than reviewing old ones! Hopefully, I can come up with a system or schedule for reviewing so that we don't lose what we've learned.

I was surprised and pleased that even though I focused on my oldest two boys (10 and 8) learning Jonah, the younger two (4 and 3) picked up a lot just from being around us while we sang.  Here's almost-3-year-old Colson reciting Jonah 1:

And here's the YouTube playlist of our recitation and the songs for each chapter.