As one who’s gifted it to expecting parents over the last year, I was delighted to see Kevin DeYoung’s The Biggest Story Bible Storybook win a Christian Book Award from the ECPA this month. And I was even more excited to learn that Crossway has published an entire Sunday school curriculum based on this fantastic…
Losing as well as finding ourselves in story is a joy for readers of all ages. Sometimes a thoroughly unfamiliar topic piques my interest, but more often it is a spark of recognition that attracts me to a book. I hope parents as well as children will find the titles below broadly relatable. Only after…
Are you acquainted with the Lupine Lady? She lives in a small house overlooking the sea, and goes by the more proper name of Miss Alice Rumphius. I’ve known her since I was a child, and I love introducing her to new friends. The Lupine Lady is the central character in the picture book Miss…
Imagination can be as seasonal as the fruit and vegetables in our kitchens, with each holding its own set of delights. Snowball fights and sledding in winter, long hours in the pool and under shady trees in summer–you understand what I’m saying. Being that we’re coming out of a long-ish winter that was heavy on…
O God of new beginnings, whose hand brings both the dripping rain and the warming afternoon sun, by which You call forth new life: bluebirds nesting, peonies sprouting, daffodils blooming; we thank you for the hopeful promise of spring. With the awakening of our blood after winter lethargy, it seems that suddenly every moment is…
Have you heard of a family that runs a dairy farm and deals with a pastor’s troublesome son? The Bobtails Meet the Preacher’s Kid is about such a family. This historical fiction by Arthur Yeomans is fitting for a fifth and sixth-grade audience. In this story, an aunt takes in four orphaned siblings. Yeomans does…
Spring is one of my favorite seasons (though I enjoy them all in their turn). I love the way the bare brown earth seems to magically come to life with wildflowers and lush green things everywhere. I adore the tiny, new leaves on the oaks, like a delicate green frost, as spring begins to awaken…
I suppose every family picks up its own lingo, usually after an adorable toddler misspeaks and her invented word becomes enshrined in the family vernacular. Thus, when something is crooked in our house—a sock, say, or a ponytail—we call it “fonky.” Or when something is of the ordinary, tried-and-true variety, we don’t call it “regular”—we…
It was like watching part of some half-lost hero tale, something that belonged to an older and darker and more shining world than mine. —Rosemary Sutcliff, The Shining Company In my personal quest to find worthy reads for my middle school students, I am returning to novels published decades ago. I want my students to…
So in the fall we caught Covid, and the day—the very day—that first test developed a second line, this package arrived. Now, any time a package arrives at our house and it’s nobody’s birthday and it’s not Christmas, the assumption is that the package is books. Ninety-nine percent of the time that assumption is correct,…
The term “apologetics” often evokes thoughts of high academia: scholars in tweed jackets strolling through the Gothic archways of a university campus, or experts with slightly unkempt hair debating from opposite podiums. On a more personal level, it can call to mind books that have shaped us, or expositions of Scripture that have guided us…
A thing I appreciate about picture books is how they can give us the ability to consider big topics in small ways. As an adult, if I were to just sit down and start pondering a Big Idea and how to teach it to a child—maybe contentment, materialism, a fair distribution of resources, needs vs….
