OK. I wasn’t going to write about this again and honestly, I didn’t think we’d do it every day (because summer has hit my get-up-and-go) but we have done it almost every single day and I simply must tell you about it!
Thriving Family magazine has this great printable summer devotional called Bible Detectives. You download a parents’ case book (which is the simple devotions divided by day), a kids’ detective notebook and a mystery decoder plus some other printables like badges, bookmarks and posters for fun.
My kids think this is the coolest thing ever.
Over the course of 3 or 4 days your kids are trying to discover the Mystery Person. To discover who this Mystery Person is, each day you do the simple activity listed in the Case Book. So far, we’ve done an obstacle course (we used pillows and other stuff on the floor that needed to be put away *grin*), ate blueberries and honey….
played a version of Blind Man’s Bluff, made a simple salt dough sculpture and created a rock sculpture.
We’re talking 1 minute of prep and absolutely no studying beforehand. After you do the activity, you read the mini-devotion (like maybe 3 sentences) and the listed Scripture. Easy peasy.
Then, here’s the super fun part. For each activity, there is also a clue to discover in the kids’ detective notebook. Usually, it’s something simple like unscrambling the word with the decoder or holding the notebook up to a mirror to read the secret. After three or four days of clues and activities, kids can guess who the Mystery Bible person is and if they are right, they glue on a picture of the person in their book to show they solved the case!
Then, after 7 days of clues (which may be 1 or 2 cases closed), you get a code to a free Adventures in Odyssey episode that correlates with the Mystery Person! How fun is that?!
We have had so much fun doing this together and it is just spot on perfect for my kids’ ages and interests. They are old enough to know and intelligently guess the Mystery Person but not old enough to actually get it on the first guess.
The devotions, activities and games are easy enough to do in 5-10 minutes but fun enough that the kids ask to do it every day. We are loving it!
If you’re looking for a devotion this summer (or anytime), I encourage you to download this one and give it a whirl. If you do it, leave me a note in the comments. I’d love to hear how you like it and how you’re doing it with your kids—because, you could go all out if you wanted: spy gear, case folders and more! (Eeek! That’s got my themed party brain spinning!)
Would your kids like to be Bible detectives this summer?
what ages would you say this is best for? Thanks for the suggestion – I’ll look into it!
I’d say any elementary aged kids. And really, just for the whole family!
a
We’re using this one too! We’ve been using it for almost two weeks now, and the children love it so much that some days they ask to do more than one lesson 🙂
Thank you so much for posting this!! I have two boys and I know they are going to LOVE this for the summer!! I am super excited about this!!
We downloaded it as soon as we saw it on your summer to do list! we haven’t started yet (Ive been procrastinating) but your post makes me super motivated to get on with it!! Thanks for the encouragement!
Looks really fun! I printed it out and have it all set up. We’ll start Monday!
this looks awesome. Thank you so much for posting about this again. I just printed everything out.
love it – thanks for reviewing GREAT stuff for us!!!
How complicated is it to put the pieces together(ie:the decoder) This looks super neat
Not complicated at all. I have a laminator so I laminated the decoder and that may have made it more complicated!
a
Thank you so much for sharing this! I can’t wait to download it. My boys are going to LOVE it! Lynn
Thanks for sharing! I downloaded and can’t wait to get started with my kiddos! And this fits nicely because our VBS this year is secret agent/spy themed! So it will be a good build up to VBS!
Perfect!!! I saw that theme, it looks so fun. My son LOVES spies!
a
Thanks so much! Love this. Just downloaded it. My kids will love it. Blessings to you and your family and thanks SO much for sharing.
This sounds perfect…learning and fun together as it should be! Thanks Amanda. We are definitely giving this on a try! God bless you!
thanks for the this! Just downloaded and printed. Heading to put notebooks together!!
Thanks so much for posting this… we are going to continue to homeschool through the summer (relaxed schedule)… and this is prefect!
Thanks for sharing about this, looks so cool, I just signed up and will be downloading this soon. My oldest is just turning 6 and will soon be in first grade – do you think he’ll need some help or is this good for his age? Can’t wait to try!
This is perfect for my almost 5 and 6.5 year old boys!!! Tomorrow is my Kindergartener’s last day of school so I was beginning to panic a bit with knowing they will be bored by next Tuesday 😉 With a baby in the house, these lessons look simple enough I think I can manage it, and I know they will love it. I’ll try to write a review on my blog once we’ve tested it out!
We have been doing it rather irregularly and still loving it.I have 5 and 7 years old.We started late and as usual our summer have been full with other activities.So we do it when we can.I keep it flexible .Some case fits in our given day routine better then other and we tackle that first.I think this is such a great great resource to introduce kids with biblical character in fun playful way and it is good for anytime of the year.Blind fold and freeze has been our very favorite ,not to mention fruit picnic (which i think we will be doing it more often)Loved their last year resources on around the world series.Enjoy !
Teach the little children the Word of God while they are young.
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Hi there. I am slightly behind everyone else, but I love this idea. I went to try and download the kit, but couldn’t figure out how to do it. I typed in my information, but then there was no link to download. Did I miss it because the summer is over? I realize that you do not have anything to do with their site, but I also couldn’t comment from their website.
I did this with my kids years ago and would like to do it again. Only problem? I can’t find where I saved the download nor can I find anywhere online in order to download it again. All the links seem to be dead. Any ideas on where I can find it?
Thanks for the tips. We printed all the kit from the focus on the family site and started on case #1 but our download does not have the parents’ case book (which is the simple devotions divided by day), So we haven’t been doing the devotions or activities other then the decoding and worksheet and reading . where can I find the case book to download? its not on their website.
Years later but I was looking too and I found the devotions here!
http://www.thrivingfamily.com/~/media/Thriving/1-articles/PDFs/cabd-casebook.pdf
My kids are finally old enough to do this and we are starting this week!