Psalm 148 is such a wonderfully visual psalm. It is also the inspiration behind the beautiful, old hymn — Hallelujah, Praise Jehovah! For this reason, it is an excellent psalm to introduce to children. With all its beautiful descriptions of God’s creation, this psalm requires beautiful art work. What better place to go to get this art work but the children themselves.

The night we studied this psalm, I made cards with a very brief description of each verse. The students were given the opportunity to choose which verse they would like to illustrate. The cards would not have been necessary if all my students were in attendance but I knew I had one little girl that comes only when she is visiting her dad. There might have been others not there for various reasons so having the cards gave me the opportunity to give the children “homework” to be turned in the next time they were in class.

The students were given a few minutes to illustrate their verse. They didn’t really know what I had planned to do with them but, much to their sorrow, I took their pictures up at the end of class. I told them they would get the back later.

Once I had all the pictures, I scanned them into my computer, cropped them eliminating unnecessary white paper and reduced the size to fit a quarter of a sheet of copy paper. I then created this little booklet. To make it easier for you, I have included a link to a pdf that has everything in my book except the pictures. You can give the students the books to illustrate completely on their own or have the class illustrate it. The easiest thing to do would be to manually cut and paste the prepared pictures onto the correct page and follow the instructions on the pdf to complete the booklet.

The result? A booklet that looks good that was illustrated by the students in class. I was surprised how excited the kids were when they got their booklets back. They loved looking for their picture, seeing what others drew and discussing Psalm 148 all over again.

Hallelujah Praise Jehovah Booklet PDf