Bible cards

A project I have underway is the creation of a set of cards for the books of the Bible. I am making this for one of our godsons, since he is at an age where he is very interested in collecting cards with bits of information on them - cards for the Magic game, for example (or baseball cards, to use an example I find easier to relate to!). 

I plan to use a second set as part of the materials for the Godly Play enrichment lesson about the Books of the Bible. I used the Keynote software (similar to Powerpoint) to design them, then printed and laminated them. The face of each card shows two pictures representing stories from the book (using the wonderful resource of Bible illustrations from Sweet Publishing), and the Gospels also show the symbols associated with each evangelist (with Luke's symbol repeated on the Acts card). Each card also has a quote from the book, a single phrase which sums up something distinctive or important about the contents.

Today I delivered the first batch - just six: four Gospel cards, one for the book of Acts, and one Old Testament book. All six are green, for narrative history. I tried to make the Gospel cards a different shade of green but that didn't show up as well as I'd hoped.

We looked together at the tables of contents of two complete Bibles (of very different sizes and layouts), and one which contained only the New Testament and Psalms. One Bible listed the books twice, once by the order in which they appear in the Bible and once in alphabetical order. My godson then went off by himself. He laid the cards out and organised them by their numbers (the order of the books of the Bible). Then he attempted to re-order them into alphabetical order. Later, using information on the backs of the cards, he might try ordering them by date of [estimated] composition, or the relative chronology of the events they describe (his parents will probably have to explain BC dating again!). 

What I also wanted to do, though, was to tie these cards firmly to the Bible and its contents. So I showed him that in his Jesus Storybook Bible there is a note at the beginning of each story saying which book (and chapter(s)) the story is taken from. And then, without him looking, I slid the cards into a Bible so that each card marked the place its book began. When he searched for them it reinforced the fact that the Gospels are found all together, three quarters of the way through the volume, while the Old Testament histories are much further toward the front. 

I'm providing several extra bits of information on the backs (which is why I've only finished six so far). But the description of the Godly Play cards by Jerome W. Berryman (in vol 2 of The Complete Guide to Godly Play) is that there's relatively little information on each card - just "one or two sentences about the content of each book", and a color-coding to show which genre the book belongs to. So if you set out to make your own, they needn't be as elaborate or time-consuming as mine.