I Can Study Esther Alone With God is a Bible study written by Karen Mohs for young children in her series “Alone With God.” This book contains 13 weekly lessons. Each week there are six lessons, one for each day, Monday through Saturday. The lessons go straight through the book of Esther, so your child will read and study the entire book over a course of thirteen weeks.

Each week’s lesson has a memory verse for your child to learn. There is a box to check each day to remind your child to pray and read or recite their memory verse. The first week’s memory verse is Esther 1:5, “And when those days expired, the king made a feast unto all the people that were present in Shushan the palace, both unto great and small, seven days, in the court of the garden of the king’s palace.” All scriptures are taken from the King James Bible.

For the first week’s lesson, the scripture reading is Esther 1:1-9. It never says to read the scripture, but each day’s questions are followed with the verse the answer can be found in. For example, the first question is “Who was king at this time? (Esther 1:1)”. There are two to four questions for each day’s lesson and they are very simple – the answers are taken straight from the Bible text. It would be a good idea to ask your child to read the entire text listed at the beginning of each week’s lesson, otherwise they may not realize they need to do so.

Scattered throughout each weekly lesson are boxes in the margin. The boxes are full of facts and trivia questions relating to the text being studied. For example, one box in the first week’s lesson says this: “How big was King Ahasuerus’s palace? It covered 300 acres. That’s ten times the size of the Pentagon!”

At the end of each weekly lesson, there is a “Think and Pray About It” box. This box has a short devotional reading for your child to read with a few thought-provoking questions. These questions are meant to be thought about, and not answered on paper. An example of these questions in the first lesson are, “What are you seeking? Worldly possessions like King Ahasuerus? Or Jesus’s pearl of great price?”

I liked several things about this Bible study. First, I really appreciate how the questions have the scripture text listed beside them. This makes it easier for young children to find the answer without getting frustrated. I also like how there are interesting facts and trivia about the lessons. It’s like a commentary for kids right in the workbook. It does answer some questions that kids will naturally have about the text and gives good visuals for the setting and people involved. I also like how it is spiral bound, which made it easy for my daughter to flip it open and read and write her answers.

I do wish the questions would have been a little more thought-provoking. It seems the majority of them were cut-and-dry from the scriptures. My nine-year-old daughter flew through each lesson in just a few minutes.

This book seems like it would work best for children ages 7-10. Your child should be able to read the Bible on his own and be able to answer questions in writing. The lines provided are quite small without much space between them, so a beginning writer may not be able to fit his letters on the lines. There is always the option to do this study orally. You could read the text to your child and then ask him the questions.

“I Can Study Esther” is available in King James and New International Version.  It is priced very low at $8.95. There are also a few other titles available – “I Can Study Jonah and Ruth”, “I Can Study 1 Samuel”, and “I Can Study Acts”, with the prices ranging from $8.95 to $23.95.

Karen Mohs is the founder of “Greek ‘N’ Stuff”, which is a website providing Greek and Latin homeschool materials and Bible studies for children, along with free activities to practice Latin and Greek.

-Product review by Megan Russell, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, LLC, May, 2017