Shout for Joy!

According to Barbara Rainey in her book Thanksgiving:  A Time to Remember, upon arriving at Plymouth, the  pilgrims read Psalm 100 in thanks to God for the successful end of their journey.

Psalm 100

A psalm. For giving grateful praise.

 ¹ Shout for joy to the LORD, all the earth.
 ² Worship the LORD with gladness;
   come before him with joyful songs.
³ Know that the LORD is God.
   It is he who made us, and we are his;
   we are his people, the sheep of his pasture.
 ⁴ Enter his gates with thanksgiving
   and his courts with praise;
   give thanks to him and praise his name.
⁵ For the LORD is good and his love endures forever;
   his faithfulness continues through all generations.


Memorizing this psalm with my kids seemed like a beautiful way to both commemorate the history of Thanksgiving and to foster a spirit of thankfulness toward God.  But can a four-year old and two-year old memorize an entire five verse psalm?  Two-year old Sis has the entire text of Fancy Nancy committed to memory, so it didn't seem too unrealistic.

I hatched this plan in October and then November crept up on me and we were a week and half in before we started.  We started working on it while outside doing a fall gardening project.  I find times like this to be perfect for memorization:  when my body is busy, but my mind is not.

Here's the strategy I used:

Repeat:  Starting with a small chunk, we all repeated the text together.  To keep this interesting, I mix it up by instructing the kids to shout it or whisper it or say it while clapping or say it while jumping and so on.  We also added some motions which seemed to help it click:

Shout for joy [cup hands around mouth like a megaphone] to the LORD [point to sky] all the earth [make a loop with arm].

Worship [wave arms like a charismatic] the LORD [point to sky] with gladness [point to the corners of a big smile on face].

Recite:  After doing it together many times, we each recite it independently.

Reinforce:  To make it more than just a memory activity, I talked to the kids about what the words meant and tried to connect the idea from the verses to experiences they have had.  We talked about times we feel joyful and times they shout for joy--like when we hear the garage door open tipping us off that Papa is home from work.

After our gardening was finished I once again slacked off on working on this with the kids, so we've really only tackled the first two verses.  However, I was delighted that when we revisited it today, Big Brother and Sis really had what we had worked on down pat.  I was especially tickled that Sis, at just two-years old, kept spontaneously saying, "Shout for joy to the 'wowrd' all 'de' 'erf.'"  So sweet!

We'll see how much more we can get memorized in the next few days and next year we'll do better.  What they evidenced today made it clear this is an achievable goal and has my mind whirring thinking about what we should work on memorizing for Christmas.