Bible Bee Review

 During the traditional school year, my children are involved in a local Awana club.  Awana includes Bible study (starting in 3rd grade), verse memorization, and a social outlet including games.  In the middle and high school years.  they also read the entire Bible (NT in middle school and OT in high school), giving a summary of each book of the Bible.  With all of that, we have decided to not do the invidual Bible studies in the HOD guides.  But when we are doing the guides in the summar, I wish we had more Bible study to do.  So this year, we decided to try The National Bible Bee. 

I have four kids.  Based on age, they placed into Beginner (5-6yo), Primary (7-10yo), and Junior (11-14yo).  So I have not seen the highest level (Senior for 15-18yo).  Here are some of the pros and cons of the program.

Pros:

• Variety of conent
• Verse memorization
• Word meaning
• Prayer
• Missions
• And more!
• Transation options*
• Everyone studying the same thing but on different levels.
• Email reminders and resources each week
• Option of print or PDF material

Cons:

• Level of difficulty
• My girls (almost 10 in Primary and 13 doing 9th grade school work in Junior) are well placed in the program.  But my boys (5yo and 11yo) would probably do better in a level below.  
• The Beginner level requries them to write letters, determine missing letters in words, etc.  Most 5 and even 6yos aren't reading fluently.  Some are just learning to form their letters!  So it is a lot most days!
• The Junior level has some activities that I actually had to look up the answer in the answer key (digital version provided).  The reasons these were challenging are addressed in the next two items.
• Reference Material Needed
• You need to have a Strong's Concordance and a specific Bible dictionary or use the online version through Blue Letter Bible for the Junior level.  I did not know this going in, so it was a little bit of a struggle to start.  Although using these references I can find to be beneficial, I think it could have easily waited until the senior level. 
• My kids use a different Bible dictionary for one lesson, and it made the a word scramble almost impossible.  Ungar's had a different word usage than Hitchcock's, and so they had not "seen" the scrambled word in the unit so far.
• Translation usage
• I thought that since they ask for Bible translation preferences that the workbooks would be in that translation.  But they are actually uniform across translation preference.  This isn't a deal breaker for us, but I know some only want to use one version.
• The mixture of versions also makes some activities hard.  I had to look up in all of the translations to see where one word (in another word scramble) came from.  It was in some form in 4 translations, but it wasn't in the one we use!  (Hellenistic in Acts 6:1)
• Schedule
• This is an 8 week Bible study, five days a week.  If you don't want to compete, you can easily do it at your own speed.  But, if you want to do the competition, you have to keep to the strict schedule.  With things like church camps in the summer, this can be challenging!  Although it only takes about 30 minutes a day to do the minumum, if you have a busy week and aren't home much, it can be too much.

Will we do Bible Bee again next year?  Maybe.  Likely, I would order one from a previous year and do it instead of this year's program.  That way we can start a little earlier and not feel any pressure to stick to their schedule.  But I don't know if you get the online answer key with the older versions.  And the key has already been very helpful in the first 5 units!