Book Reviews

I mentioned before that I've been a home school wannabe since I was a child. So it's a dream come true for me to start to plan some (very basic) home school units for this year. In addition from benefiting from our large library system, I have started buying books online. A few have arrived already. I thought I would review them as we go along for any other mothers of preschoolers out there.

A is for Adam by Ken and Mally Ham- Not as good as I'd hoped. The subtitle is "The Gospel in Genesis," which sounded promising. I had watched a video of Ken Ham back in high school and knew he was big into creationism. Our first unit is on creation and dinosaurs, so I thought it would be a perfect fit. And the parts about dinosaurs and extinction were good. The pictures were entertaining. But the gospel part focused heavily on judgment- fire insurance salvation. The snake is a huge red dragon, Adam and Eve get literally thrown out of the Garden, the angels at the entrance look angry and mean, and it gives substantially more pages to sin and judgment than to the gospel and grace. Bummer. Maybe we'll use the first few pages or save it for when we're older and can more easily fill in gaps.

This is No Fairy Tale by Dale Tolmasoff- I bought this book because it has a forward by John Piper. Not sure that was wise or not, but this book is great! Beautiful pictures, deep concept presented clearly so even young children can understand- an inspiring contrast between kings in fairy tales and our King Jesus. I'm so excited to use this book as part of our royalty and castles unit! My plan was to talk about Jesus as King anyway- and this looks like the perfect book to do that.

Each page shows two pictures- a small one showing what it would look like if the gospel was a fairy tale- Jesus would be born in a castle and loved by all and lived an easy life and died in honor, etc and a large one showing what really happened along with a short description. It ends with saying how the story of Jesus is really true and, "If you and I trust in Jesus, this story will turn out much better than a fairy tale for us. We really will live happily every after!"