Read a Bible passage, then take turns to roll the dice and chat about the question. The questions you choose are up to you.
The templates are available here for FREE. There are four options, three with questions, and one blank template for your questions. Choose six questions and write them on the sides of a dice template before you cut it out and glue them together.
You don’t always have to answer the questions. You might want to explore things further using a Bible handbook or google searches, or you might want to spend time chatting with God.
We’ve used Godly Play-style questions after a Bible story since my children were 2 or 3 years old. These are open-ended questions to start a ‘wondering’ chat, opening up the passage and developing our own connections to it.
The first dice in the set has these questions on it:
- I wonder what part of the story you like most.
- I wonder what part of the story is most important.
- I wonder what part of the story we could miss out on and still have all the story we need.
- I wonder where you might be in this story.
- I wonder what you would like to do in response to this story.
- I wonder what items you might choose to represent this story.
I’ve found these questions really helpful, both personally and in exploring the Bible with adults and children and all together. Instead of asking people to recall the facts in the story, these questions help them engage with it. They are questions even very young children can begin to answer. When the story is told with physical items, as it always is with Godly Play, even those not yet speaking can spot or pick up the piece which they like.
More recently, I’ve been looking at the Biblica Community Bible Experience, where adults and children read large chunks of the Bible at the same time as each other (there are loads of resources to help with this – check them out here). One element of it is to simplify the response to the Bible passage by giving five simple questions which can be applied to any passage, encouraging people to meet up, like a book club, and chat about their responses to these questions.
The questions on dice 2, including a “your choice option”:
- What’s something you noticed for the first time?
- What questions did you have?
- Was there anything that bothered you?
- What did you learn about loving God?
- What did you learn about loving others?
Accessible Bible
I first fell in love with their accessible Bible which works well for emerging readers, so I wanted to try out these questions. Instead of keeping them in a list or writing them on a sheet, I thought my 6 and 8 year old would respond better if they were on a dice.
As I looked into this, I saw a post by Ali Campbell about The Swedish Method of Bible study. It’s a nicely designed version you can download for free. It includes another set of questions to use after reading a Bible passage, this time aimed at young people.
Swedish Method questions on dice 3:
- Wow. What things stand out to you?
- Question. What things don’t you understand?
- Surprise. What things in the passage surprised you?
- That’s right! What things in the passage do you agree with?
- What?! What things in the passage do you find hard / don’t like?
- Deja vu. Have you read something like this before in the Bible?
- That’s me! Can you name something like it from your own experience?
- Action. What are you going to do as a result of this passage?
- Share. What can you share with someone else from this passage?
- Which questions do you prefer and why?
