170. The Beginner's Bible

The Beginner's Bible. illustrated by Kelly Pulley (Canada) - (US)

Pages: 511
Ages: 5+
Finished: Jul. 29, 2011
First Published: 2005
Publisher: Zonderkidz
Genre: Bible, Christian
Rating: 4/5

First sentence:

In the beginning, the world was empty.

Acquired: Purchased a copy through a homeschool retailer.

Reason for Reading:    Ds read to me over about the period of a year as his bible reading.  We had a schedule where on every Fri. I would put away our usual religious instruction materials and he would lead the lesson by reading for 20 minutes from this book and it would also cover his reader for the day, thus lightening Friday's load.  He started the book off managing to read one story per allotted time but by the New Testament he was reading three stories each sitting as a rule.  So we watched his reading improve over the course of this book.

This is a very nice first Bible reader for any child who is at that stage of reading and also would make a great read aloud to pre-schoolers.  The pictures are very cartoonish, which I'm not too keen on, but ds enjoyed the look of the book very much and never complained about reading from it.  A good selection of stories, including all the popular ones, with the New Testament told chronologically.  This Bible is from a Protestant point of view and as Catholics we had very little problem with that at all.  The OT presented no problems for us and the NT was only conspicuous in what it left out.  The only story we needed to talk about afterwards was the story that tells of Jesus telling Peter to "take good care of His people".  It seemed to be an afterthought and we discussed the whole real story we've read from the Gospel.  Otherwise a decent, good, entertaining, well-written easy reader, for kids to have as their first Bible they can read themselves.