Preschool Archives | Page 22 of 30 | Little Book, Big Story

August 28, 2015 / 0 Comments

The Prince’s Poison Cup

My daughter once told me, “When I’m at a friend’s house, I go straight for the books.” I loved this, because I do that, too: when invited to a friend’s house for the first time, I gravitate toward the bookshelf (especially if they have bookshelves, plural), and scan the spines for familiar titles.

I know that friendship will come easily when I see certain books lining their shelves, or better yet, when this new friend follows me to the bookshelf, leans over my shoulder and says, “You like that one? Then you have to read this.” Before I know it, my arms are full of new books.

I met The Prince’s Poison Cup at a just such a new friend’s house. As we chatted, I flipped it open carelessly and found myself confronted with an illustration so beautiful that it moved me to tears at once: a father, a king, holding his son in the deepest of embraces, both of them radiant with light.

The Prince's Poison Cup | Little Book, Big Story

I didn’t care what the book was about—we needed our very own copy. And when we did get our copy, I found that it was an allegory of quality and depth, written around the verse, “Shall I not drink the cup that the Father has given me?” (John 18:11b). R. C. Sproul puts his Bible knowledge to good use as he weaves the gospel through this story of a prince who rescued his Father’s people by . . . but wait. I won’t give the story away.

I will tell you that Justin Gerard’s illustrations do more than display the story—they interact with it, advancing the plot in beautiful double spreads. This is a story that will appeal to heroic little boys, but that has also captured the hearts of my girly girls, perhaps because it is full of the elements of the Best Story Ever (you know the one).

The Prince’s Poison Cup
R. C. Sproul, Justin Gerard (2008)

Today’s summer rerun first appeared on June 14, 2013.

August 14, 2015 / 2 Comments

A Child’s Garden of Verses

I didn’t sit down and think, “A ha! I have it—the perfect edifying exercise!” It happened on its own one day at lunch, when I picked up A Child’s Garden of Verses and began reading poetry to the girls as they finished their quesadillas.

What happened next surprised me. They asked for another poem, and then another. And the next day at lunch, they wanted me to read to them again. And so it began: we assembled a small library of dinner-table books and began thumbing through one or two of them at each meal.

Mary Oliver. A. A. Milne. Billy Collins. Shel Silverstein. Valerie Worth. Some were written for adults, some for kids, but all of them are lovely, hilarious, sustaining poetry.

We don’t do this at every meal, or even every day, but when I do grab a book from the shelf, four little eyes light up as the girls wait to see which poem I’ll choose. And when it’s from A Child’s Garden of Verses, one of their very favorites, they often put their forks down and listen closely.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s poems have a peace to them and feel for all the world as though you’re sprawled in the grass of a Scottish lawn as you listen. He had a sharp memory for the joys of childhood and a knack for choosing the perfect words to describe it. Poems like “Keepsake Mill” move me, while the girls can’t get enough of “The Cow,” “The Lamplighter,” or “My Bed is Like a Boat.” I mean, the man wrote half a dozen poems about bedtime, and every one of them is enchanting!

The only thing that could improve it, really, are Joanna Isles’s illustrations. Detailed and gorgeous, they show children doing what children do best: playing, inventing, imagining, creating little worlds within their games.

There are a number of editions of this book available, all with different illustrators, but we are all so smitten with Isles’s interpretations that I firmly encourage you, if possible, to track down her edition. We found our copy at Goodwill, and my oldest daughter spent the next day tracking a small orange cat through every single picture in the book. That’s still a great game for us, one that my youngest now loves as well: “Where is the cat in this poem? Can you find him?”

A Child’s Garden of Verses is classic children’s poetry at its best, a charming book that would fit right into any library. (Plus, it’s perfect for reading together over peanut-butter sandwiches.)

A Child’s Garden of Verses
Robert Louis Stevenson, Joanna Isles (1885, repub. 1995)

This week’s summer rerun originally published on April 26, 2013 (my 30th birthday!).

June 26, 2015 / 2 Comments

The Giving Tree

Once, a friend sat on the couch with Lydia, reading The Tale of Benjamin Bunny. Like many of Beatrix Potter’s books, Benjamin Bunny is a meandering story, so while he read and Lydia listened, I went back to making dinner and chatting with his wife. But then, something from the next room caught my ear: it was Lydia, saying, “If my mom was reading this, she would be crying right now.”

I stopped, mid-chop, and burst out laughing. She is mostly correct: I have never cried during Benjamin Bunny, but I do cry, freely and unattractively, during most of the books that we read. Our daughters have learned to wait patiently until I’m ready to go on (this can take a while in books like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe or The Railway Children), even patting my arm in a comforting way or asking, “Are these happy tears? Or sad ones?”

Usually a book elicits one response or the other. But occasionally, we read a story that hits the space right between happy and sad and draws enough of each emotion into my tears that I don’t know how to answer that question. I’m happy because the story is beautiful and because something about it rings true, but I am sad because there’s a bitterness to its truth. It feels like the coming of fall.

The Giving Tree is one of those books. You’ve almost certainly read it or had it read to you as a child; maybe you’ve tried to keep your own voice from trembling as you read it aloud to your children. The Giving Tree is a beautiful story of sacrificial love, one that demonstrates for us what it looks like to give until you have nothing left to give—and then to give away even that nothing.

I had read this book as a child; I had enjoyed it as a child. But rediscovering it as a parent was like peeling back a fresh layer of an onion: the story was sharper than I remembered, sweeter, and, yes, it made my eyes water.

The Giving Tree
Shel Silverstein (1964)

May 22, 2015 / 2 Comments

Prayer for a Child

Sometimes, you go out looking for books. You pillage the shelves of the used bookstore or library, book list in hand, or you find in the free boxes outside either place books you didn’t know you were looking for, books whose covers call to you or whose titles ring some bell in your memory and so you bring them home for closer scrutiny.

Sometimes you find books at library book sales, where the room is too small and the patrons surprisingly aggressive (these are books and they are dirt cheap and people really, really want them), but you have found so many diamonds in the rough this way that you stand outside the library at 9:58 on the first day of each sale with two dozen or so other dedicated hopefuls. When the doors open, you try to be civilized.

Sometimes, you go out looking for books. And sometimes, books find you. You receive them as a gift, or they show up in a box of odds and ends from your mother-in-law who is cleaning out shelves and closets and found a few things she thought you might like. If you had not just heard the book read on Read-Aloud Revival, you might have overlooked it, but you did just hear it read and so you recognize it for the treasure it is when you open the box.

That is the origin story of our copy of Prayer for a Child. This is a short book, perfect for a small child, and it walks through a simple prayer line by line, illustration by illustration, touching on the different parts of a child’s life that are worth thanking the Lord for but that are so easily overlooked: parents, shoes, a favorite chair. The author’s emphasis on gratitude and the lilting cadence of the prayer make this a lovely read aloud.

I will be honest, though: Elizabeth Orton Jones’s illustrations didn’t appeal to me at first (even though she won a Caldecott medal for them). It wasn’t until I looked closely at the illustrations and realized that they encapsulate an aspect of childhood in the 1940s that I came to appreciate the historical depth that they add to the book. The dated look of them underscores the fact that this prayer is timeless, as applicable for children of our era as it was for the children of World War II.

And that is a beautiful truth: when it comes to gratitude, our kids need to hear it from children of other times and places, where things weren’t (or aren’t) as plentiful as they are here and now. They need us to show them what it looks like, to lead them along gently into those moments of reverence, when we see a good thing and tilt our chins upward in delight over the God who made such a thing—a bumblebee fumbling with a long-legged poppy, or the sun through a little sister’s golden hair.

Our children need prayers like this one—we need them—to help us notice and name the good gifts our Father has set out before us.

Amen.

Prayer for a Child
Rachel Field, Elizabeth Orton Jones (1944)

More, by IC Springman | Little Book, Big Story

April 24, 2015 / 0 Comments

Our public library hasn’t changed much in the last twenty-five years. I know this because I used to go there when I was a child, and I used to go there when I was a child because I’ve lived in this town since I was three.

The librarians have probably moved a few things around, added some computers, and updated the decor a bit, but I don’t see the changes: the stained glass window is just the way I remember it, and the picture books are right where they always were. I used to explore those shelves, looking for books I would love. Now I explore those shelves looking for books I would love—and, okay, that my kids would love, too—and that is how I found More.

More is the story of a magpie who collects and collects and collects, until—well, I want you to read this book, so I won’t tell you what happens. But it’s a story that addresses our bent toward hoarding and draws out, in a mere handful of words and some powerful illustrations, a friendship that is willing to stand up to a friend enmeshed in sin and stand by a friend when that sin’s consequences take effect.

This may be reading too much into a simple story—but I don’t think it is. More doesn’t close with a pat moral, but mixes these broader themes into the story gracefully, leaning on Brian Lies’s detailed illustrations to further the text on each page, so that, by the end of the book, we have laughed at and examined and delighted in the book so fully that it’s hard to believe that there’s little more than one to two words per page. Even the limited text provides a beautiful example of a case in which less truly is more.

More
I. C. Springman, Brian Lies (2012)

Tag: Preschool (page 22 of 30)

The Prince’s Poison Cup

A Child’s Garden of Verses

The Giving Tree

Prayer for a Child

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