New Year Reading Plan
Next year I want to encourage my children to read the Bible through at least once. However, I found that most yearly Bible reading plans repeat reading the books of Psalms or Proverbs. Sure, that feature may make normal daily reading more enjoyable for adults, but extra reading is too much for children who have never read the Bible before. I wanted a plan for my children that would get them through the complete Bible and not repeat any verses. Unfortunately, most reading plans I found for children were not the complete Bible. This meant if I wanted them to read the Bible through once without repeated reading, I had to make my own plan for them.
Luckily for my children, their dad is a computer nerd. I loaded up my database with data from scrollmapper to get the book, chapter, and verse bindings. Then I proceeded to calculate the total number of verse in the 66 books of the canon of Scripture – 31,102. To make it as easy as possible, the plan would have to have an equal amount of verses for each day. (Sadly, 31,102 does not reduce into 365 or 366 rounded segments.) I was able to get all the verses into a yearly plan by having the first 77 days with 86 verses and the remainder of the year at 85 verses a day (77*86)+(288*85)=31,102.
Even with the reduced number, it seemed 86 or 85 verses a day might be too much for a 7 year old to read in one sitting. Therefore, I split the reading into two sections – morning and evening portions. The morning will have 43 verses and the evening will have the remainder. Thus, if a child cannot read all 86 verses in one sitting, they have opportunity to break it up in the day. Based upon my youngest’s reading speed, it will take him approximately 45 minutes a day to complete this reading plan.
Because this will appear to be a very difficult task for my children – to read the Bible from cover to cover in a year, we are offering them 10 โฌ per month of completed reading. Hopefully this will help them conquer bigger tasks in the future.
The generated plans and code (for leap and non-leap years) are available at https://gist.github.com/andrewwippler/b0977ef9d8c8c79483ef9110f3cb53ae