Preschool Archives | Page 28 of 30 | Little Book, Big Story

December 6, 2013 / 0 Comments

Saint Nicholas

As new parents, we didn’t know where we stood with Santa. We didn’t want to be the killjoys who declared Santa dead, but neither did we latch on to the idea of celebrating him in our home—the stockings were simply there, full of gifts from us, and the focal point of our family celebrations is and always will be the infant in the feeding trough. Making an effort to include Santa felt forced.

So we stood on an uncertain middle ground, and we weren’t really sure what to do about it until an astute four-year-old asked a surprising question after reading a book about Santa.

“Is this story fiction or nonfiction?“

Well, I said. That’s an interesting question. And so we talked about how some stories begin as nonfiction but take on fictional elements over time. There was a Saint Nicholas, I told her. But he was really different from the guy in this story.

“Why?” she asked.

That’s where this book came in. Saint Nicholas introduces little readers to the original Nicholas, a man whose generosity sparked a legend and flowed from a consuming love of Christ.

This book focuses around a particular act that brought him notoriety and blossomed into a tradition involving stockings and gifts, and closes with an interesting appendix that details how one story led to the other. The nice thing about that layout is that, for those of you who do celebrate Santa Claus but long to bring a little church history to your celebration, you can still read this book to your kids without giving away The Great Secret.

Epilogue

My conversation with Lydia didn’t end there, by the way. I went ahead and let her in on The Great Secret, and told her who really fills the stockings. If I worried about destroying “the magic of Christmas” for her, the worry was needless: she was totally smitten with the idea of her mom and dad sneaking around in our jammies, putting stuff in her stocking at night. For the rest of the week she played “Christmas” by making us lie down and pretend to sleep while she took down our stockings and stealthily filled them with odds and ends from all over the house. She scolded us if she caught us peeking.

When I gave her the official job of filling the kitties’ stockings, she simply lit up. Getting to share in the joy of giving and preparing surprises for others somehow deepened her enthusiasm, and this year, she spent an entire afternoon making gifts for our whole family (kitties and unborn sister included). Of course, she “hid” them in plain sight—on the kitchen counter, on the floor behind a wing back chair—so her technique needs a little work.

But she’s got years to practice before she steps into the role of Official Stocking Stuffer. She’ll be a pro by then.

Saint Nicholas
Julie Stiegemeyer, Chris Ellison (2007)

November 22, 2013 / 0 Comments

Come Worship With Me

During certain seasons, I long for a book about the unsung holidays—the ones that most people are dimly aware of, but do not actively celebrate. These holidays are often overlooked as being associated with, but inferior to, the “real” holidays. And so, Lent has something to with Easter. Advent has something to do with Christmas. But what?

Come Worship with Me is a beautiful introduction to the days of the church year, as a young mouse invites readers into his church to share in a full year’s worth of celebration. I came across this book (thanks to Aslan’s Library) while struggling to find a book that explained Lent and Holy Week (not just Easter) to our daughters, and was delighted to find that Come Worship With Me goes beyond that by including the greater and lesser events of the whole church year. It’s helpful to have a resource that we can return to each year as these holidays come up, to remind the girls (and ourselves) what we’re celebrating and why.

Our church honors many—but not all—of these days. The church depicted is quite different than ours, and I love the opportunity that that presents to show our daughters how differently Christians can worship, when we rarely have the opportunity to physically visit other churches. And the mouse who narrates the book does so with such child-like wonder and honesty that it’s hard not to be drawn into the joy of his church family.

This is an excellent book for any time of year, but especially now, with Advent almost upon us, it’s a great introduction to the deeper significance of the season: Christmas is not a single day or week or month, but the fruit of a full year’s preparation! And that is a lesson best learned early.

Come Worship With Me
Ruth Boling, Tracy Dahle Carrier (2010)

November 16, 2013 / 0 Comments

What is the Church?

What is the church? If church is a place that we visit once a week—to see friends, sing favorite songs and listen—then we don’t need a book to tell us what it is. Even the smallest of us can discern that the church is a physical place that exists to meet our needs—even when our need is, simply, God.

But if the church is a part of something broader, something global that doesn’t terminate at the outer walls of our own church, something that wasn’t given to entertain and serve us but that we are meant to participate in and give ourselves fully to—well. A deeper explanation might be in order.

What is the Church? is an unassuming book, not much bigger than a pamphlet, really. It’s rhyme-y and cute, with fun illustrations by Tessa Janes, but at its heart is a deep truth: the church is a family of folks who serve Christ together, who get into each other’s lives and are unified not by our own blood ties, but by our ties to the blood of Christ.

The church is a body of missionaries and servants, who go out into the world or across the street to find folks who need Christ and to share Him with them. The church is full of learners and worshippers. But more than anything the church is a living building. A thriving body of disparate parts brought together and made whole.

The church, as this book so aptly puts it, is not a “what” but a “who”: not a building, but a set of believers whose lives are intertwined. That’s the sort of thing that is tricky to explain to little ones, but this book does it so well that I’m looking forward to reading the other books in the series, What is the Gospel? and Our Home is Like a Little Church.

What is the Church?
Mandy Groce and Bill Bell, Tessa Janes (2011)

November 1, 2013 / 0 Comments

The Tale of Three Trees

The Tale of Three Trees is an old story, retold and richly illustrated. It is, as you guessed, about three trees who each have their own ambition—to be a treasure chest, a sailing ship and the tallest tree around—but whose dreams seem to crumble when the woodcutters come and put the trees to much humbler use.

This is a story about three trees, but it is also about how faithfully God walks us through valleys only to bring us out on heights both higher and grander than we could have imagined. This is a story about how closely His hand is at work in all that we do, however mundane our calling seems to be.

The Tale of Three Trees is a great story for children, who do the daily work of learning to share and be kind and not boss and do homework, but it is also a glorious story for parents, who too often let dirty dishes, laundry and long days obscure the work that God is truly doing in the humble heart of our homes.

The trees give up their grand dreams of splendor, only to have them fulfilled one-hundred-fold. And we, like seeds, go into the ground, to die daily to our own desires and to rise as a new creation, both richer and more fulfilled than we could ever, ever have hoped.

The Tale of Three Trees
Angela Elwell Hunt, Tim Jonke (1989)

October 25, 2013 / 2 Comments

How God Makes Babies

The Talk. It’s coming—you know it is. One of these days, your child is going to ask you—probably in mixed company—how that lady got a baby in her belly. Or why your son has different equipment than your daughter. Or, the classic, where do babies come from?

And you will hope for grace and ease and for just the right words. You may say gently, “Well, we can talk about that more when we get home,” or you may turn beet red in the check out line and panic while the English language escapes you. Or, you might have a copy of How God Makes Babies at home and feel like now, now is the time to pull it out and have The Talk.

For us, that time came around midday last Friday. In anticipation of the more pointed questions of our five-year-old, I fully expected to hear the ” . . . but how did the baby get in there?” line of questioning during this pregnancy, and so on a friend’s recommendation I bought Jim Burns’s book, How God Makes Babies. I am nothing if not preemptive.

But for a number of reasons (many of which came from this post), we decided not to wait until our kids started asking questions, but to broach the subject ourselves, since we want our girls to know from an early age that these are things we can talk about together. We want to hear their questions and help them find the answers.

And so I said a quick prayer that Lydia would keep only the information that she needs now. Then I curled up with her and read How God Makes Babies. The book turned out to be an invaluable resource, as it covered pretty much everything one could hope for at an age appropriate level: who has which private parts, what they’re for and who can and cannot touch them, plus (most pertinent for our family) how a baby grows and develops and eventually makes its way out into the world.

Burns gives great, concise answers to complex questions, but doesn’t oversimplify. He explains marriage well; he explains sex and puts it in its intended context. As a chronic over-explainer, I was thankful for a book that gave measured answers to such big questions without overwhelming readers with useless detail.

I do not expect our conversations on this topic to end with this book, but for now, the door is open and the book is on the bookshelf. I even read selected passages to Sarah, and now both girls love to read over the pages about the baby’s development, which is, perhaps, all they need for now.

How God Makes Babies comes with an age recommendation of 6-9. I also ordered a copy of God Made Your Body, which is aimed at a younger audience (ages 3-5) and focuses more on how cool our bodies are, how we’re all different and so on, while deftly sliding an explanation of the differences between boys and girls into the narrative. It also talks about pregnancy and birth, so the girls have really enjoyed that one, too. And no one has used awkward terms in awkward circumstances (so far).

Of course, be sure to pre-read these books before you read them with your kids, and use your discretion about when to introduce which topics to your kids (you can always spot read relevant sections of the book and save the rest for later). You know them far better than I do.

How God Makes Babies
Jim Burns (2009)

God Made Your Body
Jim Burns (2009)

Tag: Preschool (page 28 of 30)

Saint Nicholas

Epilogue

Come Worship With Me

What is the Church?

The Tale of Three Trees

How God Makes Babies

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