Bible

About this course

Sixth grade returns to the eight-strand rotation but now teaches it at close to a young high school level. The Old Testament survey covers Genesis through Deuteronomy in the first pass and Joshua through Josiah in the second, including honest treatment of Leviticus and Numbers rather than skipping them. The New Testament survey moves from the four Gospels through Acts and then letter by letter through Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Thessalonians, and the pastoral epistles. Character is taught first through the fruit of the Spirit one at a time, then through the Beatitudes verse by verse. Bible study skills go well beyond finding a reference: literary genre, Hebrew and Greek and how translation works, figurative language, letting Scripture interpret Scripture, the danger of reading out of context, and what to do with the hard passages. Church history covers Constantine, the Nicene controversy, the Church Fathers, and then a full unit on the Reformation, including Luther, Calvin, the English church, and a close look at the Anabaptists, the Schleitheim Confession, Michael Sattler, Felix Manz, the Martyrs Mirror, Menno Simons, and the Dordrecht Confession.

There are 180 lessons across 15 units, one per school day, at about 25 minutes each. A lesson is a substantial page of teaching organized under subheadings, with the King James text quoted and cited throughout and terms bolded and defined. Every lesson ends with a ten-question multiple-choice quiz that grades itself.

Two units are worth knowing about before you begin. The second apologetics unit takes up origins directly: it distinguishes observational from historical science, presents young earth creation as the position it holds, works through fossils, radiometric dating, and the biblical genealogies, and is candid where creationists themselves are, saying plainly that the starlight problem is real and not fully resolved. And one lesson in the first ethics unit, God's Design for Sexuality, teaches marriage as one man and one woman and makes the case for purity from 1 Corinthians 6 and Matthew 5; it is a moral and doctrinal lesson, not a biology lesson. Elsewhere the course generally presents the Anabaptist convictions on baptism, nonresistance, and the oath as its own heritage while describing rather than deciding the questions Christians still debate.

What the course covers

• Old Testament survey from Genesis through the kings of Judah
• New Testament survey: the Gospels, Acts, and Paul's letters book by book
• The fruit of the Spirit and the Beatitudes
• Biblical interpretation: genre, context, figurative language, and original languages
• Church history from Pentecost through the Church Fathers and Nicaea
• The Reformation, the Anabaptists, Schleitheim, and the Martyrs Mirror
• Apologetics: God's existence, the reliability of Scripture, and the resurrection
• Origins: creation, the fossil record, dating methods, and the age of the earth
• Ethics: authority, truthfulness, work, money, poverty, technology, and purity
• Worldview: the four-chapter story compared with humanism, postmodernism, materialism

What your student will be able to do

• Interpret a passage using its genre, context, author, and audience
• Explain the difference between observational and historical science
• Summarize the seven articles of the Schleitheim Confession and why they mattered
• Give a reasoned answer for the resurrection and the reliability of the Bible
• Identify the core claims of humanism, postmodernism, and materialism
• Apply a biblical ethic to questions of money, authority, speech, and technology

Scope and sequence

All 15 units of Bible for Grade 6, in the order they are taught.

Every lesson, by title

All 180 lesson titles are listed here — nothing is withheld until you download. Open a unit to read its contents.

One whole lesson, exactly as it comes

This is a real lesson taken from the middle of the course — the teaching text, the practice, the homework, and the first three quiz questions with their answers. It is not a marketing excerpt.

What you will need

Drawn from the materials named across all 180 lessons of this course. Most families already own most of it.