Sunday

How to learn Psalm 46 v 1 Plus Free Phone Screen Saver - Bible Memorization


In this post I want to help you to memorise Psalm 46 v 1 both the words and the reference.

If you think

 NO. NO. NO. Too Difficult for me  

then have a look at  Top 10 Ways to learn Scripture - Bible Memorization  and you will get some advice & encouragement to realise that we can memorise scripture more easily than we think.







Psalm 46 is one of those Psalms that we turn to in times of worry, fear, need of God's protection or many other times in our lives.

The first verse of this Psalm is well-known to many but sometimes they don't know where to find it in the bible.

Or people may remember having heard that Psalm 46 is of great comfort in trying times but they don't remember what it actually says. 

That is why we need to memorize not only the words of a verse but also the reference of the verse for ourselves and also for sharing it to encourage others.


That's why Bible Memorisation is so important.



So let's look at 3 things:
  • Memorising this Scripture with Children
  • Memorising this Scripture as Adults
  • Some Freebies to help you.



Memorising this Scripture with Children

This is a Great verse for kids to learn along with the Story of the young Joseph.
You know the story of the Coat of Many Colours and the story of the Hatred of His Brothers.


This verse teaches us just what a strong, protective God we have who is present with us at all times and is the one we can always trust in.


If you want to see how I teach this one to the kids you'll find it at    Psalm 46 v 1  -  Memory Verse







which is on my other site for Kids Work at The Ark Page  






Using this for kids I would use A5 or A4 cards as shown below





which gives us the first half of the verse which I would do with the very young children and then add the second part of the verse for the older children.

Go on over and see more about the practical way of teaching this verse to kids at The Ark Page





Memorizing this Scripture as Adults

 Grown-ups who want to learn the verse of course can't be seen to be carrying around A5 sized cards etc. 'cause that is just not cool, then we have a Bible Verse Graphic instead.








Or this one which gives verses 1 & 2  which brings out more meaning and assurance to us.







But to get the whole portion of scripture involved here we really need to read the first 3 verses and then on seeing the Selah we can pause and consider it all together fully.




God is our refuge and strength,

A very present help in trouble.


Therefore we will not fear,

Even though the earth be removed,

And though the mountains be carried into the

 midst of the sea;


Though its waters roar and be troubled,

Though the mountains shake with its swelling.

Selah



Why even think about looking here at the first 3 verses when we are supposed to be thinking about memorising verse 1?

Well when talking about learning Bible Verses I always want to stress that we should know the context of the verses and be sure we understand the meaning correctly.




So what are the practical helps for Adults?


Referring back to Top 10 Ways to Learn Scripture - Bible Memorisation

We could choose some of those ways that suits this verse


1.  2.  4.  8.  9.  are the ones that spring most to mind for this.


Why not pin this to memorize it later 






1.  Read it often each day

Leave your Bible open at the verse or have a bookmark in your Bible so that you can quickly and easily read the verse or verses.   Do this as often as you notice the Bible or you remember to about the verse.




2.  Write it out a few times each day

a)   Start a notebook for writing out the verses you want to memorize.
You may even find you want to sketch some decorative art around it - then it becomes your Bible Art Journal.  You read and say the verse to yourself as you write and draw.

b)   Keep some sheets of file paper handy and write the verse several times on a single sheet each time.





4.  A Testimony Statement


Getting some meaning really helps.
Or some way for you to associate with the words.
The Psalmist was saying these words as a statement of what He had proved the Lord to be and the second sentence enforces the meaning of the first one.




8.  Make it easy to see it clearly & regularly each day.


To help with this you can have a Bible Verse graphic like I often include in my blog posts or like the ones I share daily on Sandra's Ark Facebook Page

Come and follow me on Facebook and get a daily encouraging Bible Verse in your Facebook feed.


a)   You can write out the verse a few times on paper or card (preferably not cursive so that you can read it easily) and place it somewhere you will not be able to ignore it.

Examples:  Bathroom Mirror,   Fridge Door,  any place you look at each day.



b)   You can use the one above with the verse on a mountain and sea background.





This verse is available for downloading FREE HERE and you can print it out (there are 6 to a page)
Print out one copy of it and you have 6 to place in strategic places around your home.

You can also laminate them if you want to use them for a prolonged period of time.

Remember the 2 verses can be learnt separately and then put together.

The picture chosen here is actually a visual help with the association of the mountains and sea. 




9.  Make it easy to see it at different times or any time of the day.


a)   Most of us carry our phones with us wherever we go now so if you have a verse as your screen saver you will always have it there to look at and read over.
The type of the first graphic we saw above would suit because it is ideal as a phone screen saver.

You can download it  HERE for FREE






b)    Again using the square graphic with the mountains and sea print it out and laminate at least one to keep in your wallet, purse, or handbag for easy access when you have to sit and wait somewhere during the day - kids school collection,  dentist waiting room,  hairdressers while your colouring is setting.

c)    Write it out as in 8. a. above and laminate if you do not want the graphic - This way you can learn all three verses if you wish.




Some Freebies to help you

Please take up the opportunity of the free graphics mentioned above, they are all free for you to use but please don't share them with others instead direct your friends to this blog and they can download them for themselves.

Just click on the links below:

PHONE SCREENSAVER

Mountain & Sea GRAPHIC



Or if you have already subscribed to my blog you will find the link to the Free Printables in any of the emails we send out.








Friday

How to Organise Books


Books, books and more books!!!!

My husband and I like to go on holiday to relax and READ.

So each time before we go we do something rather important.

We made sure we have decided on what books we are going to read.









Years ago we always had to come to an agreement over books before we could pack because we needed to pick 4-6 books that we both wanted to read and then we could share the books while we were away, simply because books took up weight in our luggage.









Now we take our kindles with us and we don't have to share any books at all so we can have completely different reading lists.
But we still sit down to make sure we have thought about the books we want to read and make sure we have them downloaded from the cloud onto our devices so that we can read what we want at any time regardless of WiFi.


Oh the joys of the kindle.

Even if we are still using our original old Kindles with our lighted cases which we absolutely love.








We have loads of ebooks and I'm usually keeping an eye out for good ebook offers so the amount of those on our Kindles are ever increasing.


By this stage you may be wondering why I am talking about books & ebooks when this is part of  my posts about Organising


Books in My Study


So what about the books on my bookshelves in my Study?


They used to look like this






but then after a good tidy up they look like much better than this and the bookcases and more details about the tidy up can be found at  Organized Bookcases

As you can see I have 4 bookcases here and they are still full plus a few small crates of books which I have decided I will give away when I finally get round to reading them.

The cupboards at the bottom of two of the bookcases do not contain books - they have folders, files puzzle books for Kids Work and Language study files and notes from our time learning Dutch while living in Belgium.


My husband did suggest one time that we could throw out all the books on the bookshelves and only have ebooks.



Sacrilege!  cried our oldest son who was with us at the time.



As for me I just said

"what if we want to read them again?"  


and 


"we haven't even read them all yet"




Bookshelves - categories

The farthest bookcase is all Christian Novels in alphabetical order by author except for the bottom shelf which contains Bible Study Books from all the years of leading youth groups & homegroups

The next one contains the rest of the Christian Novels in alphabetical order by author except again for the bottom shelf which this time contains our non-fiction Christian books.

On the third Bookcase the top 2 shelves are devoted to Bibles, commentaries, dictionaries and Bible info books.
The last shelf contains my complete Herron Collection of Agatha Christie novels - Red hardbacks.

On the last Bookcase I have family photo albums, cookbooks, other miscellaneous books that are special to me, my journals from when we lived in America and Belgium and some Dutch novels.


We did do a bit of a clear out when we were moving house last time but there are still many to keep so they needed to be sorted better on the shelves and an inventory made of them.







How do we remember all the books we have and not end up buying repeats?

The basic answer to this was mentioned above - I made an inventory of all my books.

This was not a quick easy job, it took quite some time but I was determined not to fall into the trap that my husband had done on various occasions previously - Yes Fred has been known to buy the same book twice!


How do we keep a note of what we have?


I make an inventory of all the real books we have.  (I'll cover ebooks later)



One solution for this is Spreadsheets.


A)  I have my spreadsheet of my list of the full set of Heron Books of Agatha Christie novels that I had collected over the years.
Each book contains 2 novels.




as you can see because I now know I have got the whole collection I really have this list to keep more info like the date each novel was written, the order no. of the novels and dates of movies made.

This of course is just a section of it here.



B)  I also have a spreadsheet of my list of Nelson DeMille Books. 
Fred & I have become quite the fans of this action thriller author and have most of his books in paperback.





Looking at his now I see I didn't fill in all the rest of the Y's  because we have now read all the books of his that we own.



C)  I have a spreadsheet for all the other books on the bookcases  (an excerpt from it is below)



but it needs updated now yet again although not too many new ones to add - mostly the ones our son buys us for Christmas & birthdays because he always buys a book "you can hold and turn real pages".




D)  Then when I had done all that I decided to make a spreadsheet of ALL the books of Agatha Christie in Chronological order.

That wasn't enough for me so I started adding in the DVD, Television, and cinema adaptations noting all the dates and whether I had watched them and which ones I had on DVD etc. - all colour coded of course.

I already had got 3 different Christie reading lists from various places online so I got most of my info on dates from these and which books had gone by different names in the UK and USA.




I think I got a bit carried away with my colour coding too.




Another solution for this is to use an App.


A couple of years after tackling those spreadsheets I thought maybe an app for my iPad would be a good idea to keep all the data there because I love my iPad.

Also perhaps easier to carry the info around with me on the iPad, to make sure WE remembered which books we already owned, rather than have it on spreadsheets.

So several different times I have had a look for apps and of course being the person I am I really only want a free app or at least one that is very very cheap.


Well I found a few apps and tried them out







but they seemed to be even more time consuming to put in all the data than my Spreadsheets were!

In fact some of the apps were not at all straightforward for inputting the data.




My Final Solution for this is the Spreadsheets


So I decided to go back to the original Spreadsheets and just keep updating as I buy more or  just when I'm sorting through the books.

I use Readdle Documents App on my iPad and I can keep copies of those spreadsheets there and of course it is easy enough to make a change to a spreadsheet on the computer and then save a new copy of that to the App.



Now I have to say it did take a lot of time to do these spreadsheets as I kept getting caught up in the


"Can I bear to part with this book?" 

and  

"Maybe I can find this book as an ebook"

as I went along.





Ebooks

I am still trying to finalize a list of all the ebooks we have - thank goodness Fred & I share our ebooks under the one account but as I go along I can save it as a PDF anytime I want for ease of quick reference and put it on the Kindle app on my iPad as well as into Readdle Documents.

See Agatha Christie and ebooks files:






However I have to admit that the list of ebooks will never be finalised.
We will never stop buying books!
But we do try now to get the majority of our books as ebooks so we are still buying books but they are so much easier to store! 

Of course the great thing about ebooks for the kindle is the fact that when you go to purchase an ebook in Amazon you get a warning if you have already bought it - I have been thankful for that feature too.








How do you organise your books?

Do you still like to have real books and enjoy turning the pages?

Or are you a Kindle devotee?

  




Monday

The 5 Best Apps for Relaxation Time - Coffee & Conversation


We all need to relax on a regular basis.

How you relax and how I relax may be very different.

Today I'm thinking of resting on the couch with my iPad.


So I thought I would share my 5 favourite apps for when I want to sit down and forget about everything around me and relax with my iPad.







Let's have that look then at my choice for the 5 Best Relaxation Apps on the iPad.  

The ones I want to use when I'm relaxing.



Wordfeud      FREE

This is the GAME app I am on it every day.
So easy to dip in and out of for a quick game or relax for a while playing all the opponents you want to just before bedtime.

Of course as with most apps there is an option to pay to get rid of ads but they never really bother me at all.

It is very similar to scrabble and we are all familiar with that well-know game.






I actually wrote about this one individually in another post The Best Game on my iPad





Battleships     FREE

There are many battleship apps but the one I use is called  SeaBattle by Conceptis

It has many sets of free games and then also Regular new free games but also in-app purchases if you want to binge play.

The joy of it is you can replay the games over and over again because you can undo them and start again - after you have forgotten them of course.

So even if you do buy some sets of games you get plenty of use out of them for years.










Pic-a-Pix      FREE

I have enjoyed the game of Hanjie for many years in book form and still have more Hanjie books to use but although I do prefer the game using pencil and paper there are times when it is handy to have it on the iPad as well.

There are different varieties of names for this type of puzzle but it originated as the Japanese Hanjie so I am still used to calling it that no matter what it says on the app.

So if you are a spacial, logic or number puzzeler then give it a go it is so relaxing even though you do have to work your mind at the same time.

This one is made by the same company as the Battleships one above.










Spotify      FREE

The first one in this list that is not a game.
Easy convenient way to listen to music that you like where and when you like.
My husband used it so much he decided to get a paying account but I'm still on the free one and happy using it.











NoteMaster   FREE

This is note app as is obvious from the name.

It is colourful with the choice of different themes to work in.
Notes can be categorised and the test is easily bolded and resized etc.

I like the look of it and the ease of use of it and the ease of storing and syncing the notes.
Plus you can very easily add pictures at the start and end of any note plus anywhere within the note that you want.





You can see from the pic above that I have a lot of categories and a lot of notes.


I hope you enjoy relaxing with some apps on your iPad or any tablet because these apps or similar ones can also be got on android.