It’s Tuesday.
And it’s still winter! 🙂 For a few days, we had high hopes of spring being on the way, but knew that it was highly unlikely. Ohio tends to do this to you–ups and downs on the thermometer. It goes along with the variety in seasons that we are blessed with!
What is on your agenda this week?
Right now our family is kind of in the middle of “Bible Quizzing.” This year I have two daughters participating. For those of you that might be new to this, I’ll try to explain how this works. (I’m also still learning the ropes, so by no means have it all down yet, but I’ve learned a lot!)
Last year was our first introduction to this, our oldest daughter participated. This year, our two middle girls are quizzing, and I agreed to help out as an assistant coach, to help me get more of a feel of what is going on, in the event that I might want to be a coach next year. (as opposed to jumping in & trying to coach a team without having the slightest idea of what that means!)
So, this year they’ve had to memorize John chapters 1-5. They found out what the memory passages were last year, before the end of that school year. So they had lots of time to memorize. And they can memorize so quickly! (I like to tell myself that I should also memorize with them. Somehow, I am finding out that memorizing is HARD work for me now! It used to come quite easily, but it is not that way anymore. The verses that stick with me are the ones I memorized during my own school days. And I think the girls find it a bit amusing when they try & have me recite what I know to them. After all–memorizing is easy! 🙂 )
After the current school year is well underway, all the students participating, (known as quizzers) are divided into teams, and assigned coaches. They work on getting their verses memorized, and then there are school practices each week.
At the practices, they ‘quiz’ against other teams in their age bracket/division. What this means is that each student has a chair with a pad/light on it, a pad that is attached to the quiz box by a cord. They have to sit just so on their light, and then if they jump or move their leg, the light goes off and it beeps. There is a quizmaster running the quiz box, and they read a question, and as soon as they’ve begun reading, they release the button that allows the lights to begin going off. The quizzers have to learn how to jump at the right time, soon enough that theirs is the first light that goes off, but not so fast that they burn the question, which basically means, they jump so fast they have no idea what the quizmaster was going to say. This is definitely an art and takes lots of practice!! 🙂
The questions involve finishing verses, reciting verses from the reference only, or basic questions regarding the content of the verses. This means, not only do they have to know the verses really thoroughly, they also have to know what they mean!
Back in December we had our initial quiz meet, an invitational. We got together with teams throughout our region, from about six other schools. This quiz meet was strictly a breaking in, for fun. Now we are in the middle of the ‘real quiz meets’.
Our girls are in the junior division, and even though this is the easier level of quizzing, let me tell you, the competition is quite stiff! Each team gets at least 4 quiz matches. Then they go by how well they placed in those matches, and the top teams move on to the playoffs, or finals. The top three teams in each division, in those finals, gets to take home a ribbon.
The last event for the Bible quizzing is the Quiz Retreat. This is a two day event, and includes a lot more quizzing, and also some other fun times for the quizzers and coaches.
All in all, this is an excellent ‘sport’ (for lack of a better term) for young people to participate in. They can learn many valuable life lessons. Not limited to, but including-having good attitudes, whether winning or losing; making new friends; the value of persistence and sticking with a task; and of course, the most important, memorizing God’s Word and hiding it in their hearts.
Because we are in the middle of this exciting time, this means the girls are each reciting the first five chapters of John every day, or maybe even several times a day! They also have review flashcards. And all of this is on top of their normal school work.
This is a great way to stay away from those ‘boring days of winter’! 🙂 (We haven’t found any time for boredom yet!)
On Friday we look forward to our 2nd quiz meet, and then in two weeks after that, we’ll have our final quiz retreat, which will end the Bible quizzing for this year.
We hope to take a bit of a breather then, before they do it all over again, next year! 😉
What are you doing to stay busy this winter?!
All-of-a-kind Mom 