Wednesday January 26, 2005
I’ve been looking for a good bible story or bible for Zane and found it surprisingly difficult. I finally decided on “The Beginners Bible” (shown below) These are the things I was looking for:
Decent illustrations. He is very visually oriented, and the pictures are going to have a huge impact on him, and I found a lot of the books had several different problems…either they were a bit scary/freaky looking, or most of the people in the book were really, really white. The Beginners Bible had a nice balance between cartoon/non-scary drawings, and many different skin tones throughout. Some of the things were a little humorous to me…like every time it talked about people getting married it seemed that the bride wore a modern white wedding dress, but I could live with that.
Had a good overview of stories. Some of the kids bibles seemed to have very few stories and I wanted something a little more comprehensive, so he got a sense of the flow of things. Evidently, the loaves and fishes story is the most popular story to tell kids because that one was almost always included in every book. lol
The thing I struggled with the most is finding the balance between accuracy and being understandable to a young child. It is the same thing we run in to at the adult level when you read the “Good News” versions…when you make the language simpler, it can subtly change the meaning. There were a number of bibles that I put down because I really didn’t like how they handled simplifying the stories. It can’t ever be ‘perfect’, but I felt like the Beginner’s Bible kept the message in tact enough that I could honestly elaborate when he had questions without haveing to ever say “well, I think that parable actually means…., not what it says”. I don’t want him to hear the phrase, “that isn’t really true” in reguards to anything in the bible. I can’t give specific examples of the top of my head, but there were some books where I just shook my head because I felt like they missed the entire point of some of the parables..it was dumbed down to just plain dumb. This book seems to handle the simplifying process really well. I also liked that it is was simple enough, and not too wordy, so it wouldn’t loose his attention. Some of the books, even though the illustrations and format made it seem like it was for his age, were so wordy that there was no way he was going to sit still and wait for the page turn.
The last consideration for us was price. The Christain book stores in town, where there is the best selection, are also pretty pricy for us. I wish that didn’t need to be a consideration, but it is. I would love to have a bunch of Christain oriented books, but they are just so much more than other books, and I hesitate to buy them on Amazon or some discount place online without reading it first. I do occasionally drive all the way across town ( a good 30-45 minute drive) to read some of the books there, and then look for them other places, but the only way I can really read them is when Zane is not with me. lol. major problem there. So, if anybody reading knows of good toddler/preschool Christian books, let me know. I had seen this book at the CBS, but it was a whole lot more than the $10 I found if for at Walmart.
