Mega Memory Month, a bit late...:)

My mom started me memorizing Scripture from a very young age...somewhere around 4. I remember learning verses from strips of construction paper backed in felt and stuck to a feltboard. A few years later, through the work of Heber and Steve McKissack, we became involved in the Bible Memory Association program in our church. BMA was the single-most important organizational influence in my life, other than our churches themselves. We were challenged and held accountable to learn books of Scripture verses each year, and then spent time each summer at the BMA camp in Ringgold, LA. Not only were those weeks packed with solid Biblical teaching (plus tons of fun and superb food :)), we built relationships with some incredible Christians who impacted my life in huge ways.
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So...Scripture memory has always been a priority in my mind and heart, even if we haven't been terribly consistent in making it happen lately. It *usually* has a prominent spot in our school day, but I have realized recently that we aren't nearly where I want to be with it.

I had decided a week or so ago that I personally was going to learn Psalm 91. About that same time, I decided that the kids and I were going to begin working on a longer Scripture passage, rather than individual verses, during our Scripture memory time in school. I finally settled on Psalm 1, and the kids and I did some study on it week before last, in preparation to get serious about memorizing it next week, after Billy's vacation.
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Then the other day, I happened across a couple of pertinent articles. One was a post by Ann Voskamp about their participation in Ann Kroeker's Mega Memory Month. I loved the Mega Memory Month idea immediately, so even though we are a bit past the October 1 start date, we are going to jump in and participate anyway!
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The Ann Voskamp post is, as usual, truly excellent and so perfectly expresses the main reason I want to participate in this project. Love, love, love the last line of her post..."We thoroughly intend to blaze with your glory..."
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The other article I ran across brings up a secondary reason I want to participate in this project. Andrew Pudewa, director of the Institute for Excellence in Writing, discusses the importance of poetry memorization in building good writers here. I found his article fascinating and challenging. This is another area in which I have good *intentions*, but we've been pretty hit and miss in reality. My children *love* to memorize poetry, and I need to take advantage of that!

So...here's the plan.
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We are going to start with the Scripture passage we had already planned to memorize in the next few weeks...Psalm 1...




We are also going to memorize a poem. Another thought I had a week or so ago is that my children aren't nearly as familiar with my favorite children's poetry as I would like for them to be, and that I would like to remedy that. Andrew Pudewa gave me the perfect excuse to pull out some of my favorite poetry books from my childhood. We are starting with my all-time favorite, Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses. This copy was a gift from my Granny and Papa Marks on my first birthday. :) It is inscribed by my grandmother, and is one of my most treasured books....

My very favorite poem in the book is "The Land of Counterpane", but for some reason, I didn't feel it was a good choice for our first memory project from the book. So, I chose another favorite, "My Shadow"....

The plan is that I will post on our progress each week, including any memorization tools that we find helpful along the way (Ann Kroeker has some great suggestions at her blog, linked above), and then link to it at Ann Kroeker's blog. Hopefully the accountability will keep us on our toes! (Feel free to comment with questions about our progress if we go too long between MMM posts! :))