Are you looking for biblical, age-appropriate ways to celebrate Women’s History Month with the kids in your Sunday school program? Look no further! Our friends at Beaming Books have just the books for you. For younger kids, check out the picture book Gritty and Graceful: 15 Inspiring Women of the Bible by Caryn Rivadeneira; for middle-grade readers, check out Grit and Grace: Heroic Women of the Bible by the same author. And remember, it’s good for boys as well as girls to learn about strong, heroic, divinely favored women. All kinds of people need to know that all kinds of people can do great things. This includes adults—if you're looking for books for grownups, check out this blog post from Augsburg Fortress.
Gritty and Graceful features first-person accounts and Bible verses that tell the stories of Eve, Hagar, Miriam, Rahab, Deborah, Hannah, Naomi and Ruth, Queen Esther, Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary and Martha, the woman at the well, the bleeding woman, and Mary Magdalene. Each story concludes with the sentence, “God did great things for me—and I did great things for God,” followed by a Bible verse about the biblical woman or women in the story.
If you want to help kids engage with Gritty and Graceful, especially during Lent (which tends to coincide with Women’s History Month), use this study guide!
Grit and Grace also features first-person retellings of Bible stories from the perspectives of biblical women, as well as sidebars with fast facts, plus questions and prayer prompts at the end of each chapter. The women in Grit and Grace are Eve, Hagar, Leah, Miriam, Rahab, Deborah, Hannah, Naomi and Ruth, Queen Esther, Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary and Martha, Mary Magdalene, the Samaritan woman, the bleeding woman, Dorcas, Lydia, Phoebe, and Priscilla.
To help kids engage with Grit and Grace, use this study guide!
If the boys in your class don’t understand why they need to learn about women, remind them that the girls in their classes have learned about biblical men like Abraham, Moses, David, and Jesus, and it’s fair for boys to learn about women as well. The story of Deborah the general should have something for everyone, if you’re looking for a way to ease boys as well as girls into these books. But read about at least a couple of the other women as well—fighting in wars isn’t necessary to be interesting or worthy of attention.