Teaching the Faith at Home: Memorizing Hymns

As a family, we do devotions before bed. Our devotions involve working on the kids' memory work, so we were familiar with teaching memory work line by line, repeating each three times, but it never dawned on us to use the same method for hymns.

We began teaching our kids hymns simply by singing the same hymn over and over for several weeks. This was effective, but as we discovered there was an easier way to do it. Last summer, my husband went to the Consortium for Classical Lutheran Education (CCLE) conference. One of the speakers there, Pastor Mark Preus, led sectional on teaching hymns. He discussed how he learned hymns as a kid from his dad, line by line, repeat three times.

Now, we follow the same method, each line is sung by my husband and repeated three times by the rest of us. We do not follow along on paper, but engage our memory so that we learn the words. We go all the way through the hymn once this was on the first night, then we sing it one time through.

We've discovered that while our kids don't know the hymn perfectly the next night, they are well on their way and in two or three nights, they have it down!

My three year old's favorite hymn is God's Own Child, I Gladly Say it. She sings it every night when she goes to sleep. I enjoy that when we sing hymns like, Salvation Unto Us Has Come, in church that my kids can sing along, but more than that I enjoy knowing that what these hymns teach my children is so valuable!

They learn through hymns about their baptism and the salvation one for them on the cross. They learned about Christ's transfiguration this year when we learned 'Tis Good Lord to Be Here. As we continue teaching them hymns throughout the years they will continue to grow in understanding their faith as they sing.

We choose the hymns we do carefully. We want the hymns to teach our children well. We use The Lutheran Service Book as a guide and we try to choose hymns that teach what we desire for our kids to learn. We chosen hymns like Lord, Keep Us Steadfast in Your Word and Savior of the Nations Come.