Book Review: The Catholic Children's Bible

When you think of a children's bible the first thing that probably comes to mind is a picture bible that has selected bible stories.  I know that's been our experience with children's bibles.  And the few that are actual bibles are difficult for younger readers to use either because it's just not geared to helping a young child be able to read and understand the bible.  The Catholic Children's Bible from Saint Mary's Press bridges the gap and gives young readers in the second through fourth grade age range a bible that is accessible for them.

The Catholic Children's Bible is set up in such a way that children will be

able to read it, navigate through it and most importantly, understand it.  Reading this bible is easy for a young child because the print is large enough that they can follow along without getting lost in the text.  Vocabularly words are in bold and there's a column divider on the page that helps young readers learn how to read pages with a two-column format.  Finding a particular book in the bible is easy thanks to the color coding and labeled tabs.

Now maybe your wondering what this bible has to offer to a child to capture his or her attention.  Sure, large type, and color coded sections and tabs are nice, but is there anything else that makes this bible stand out?  Indeed, there is.  First, each of the books of the bible has a great child friendly explanation as an introduction.  And, then there's the featured stories.  If a particular book has a featured story, it is listed immediately following the introduction for the book along with the page number where you can find it.  These featured stories are told on a colorfully illustrated two page spread.  There's an illustration that gives you a feel for the story, followed by the scripture.  Within the scripture, key words are highlighted and are then defined after the passage.  A section called "Understand It!" gives an excellent explanation of the story.  The "Live It!" section gives children a practical life explanation that they can relate to for how to put the lesson they learn from this story into practice in their own lives.  Finally, the "Tell It!" section gives children the opportunity to tell the story in their own words using pictures from the story.  I like the layout of the story format because it encourages children to think and act on what they learn from the story.

To really see how accessible this bible is for an elementary school aged child, I asked my daughter who is in second grade to look a few things up.  She has some experience with looking up scripture in a First  Communion bible that is really laid out like most regular bibles with just a few full color inserts added in.  Typically, it takes her a while to find what she's looking for when she's looking up scripture in her bible.  With The Catholic Children's Bible, she was able to find the book she was looking for quite a bit faster, and she had an easier time navigating through the text to find the chapter and verse.  With her regular bible she typically has a lot of trouble when it comes to finding the verse numbers and then once she finds it she struggles to read the tiny type.

As a catechist, I like that this children's bible is so much more than just a bible.  There are some great teaching resources available to help children get even more out of this great bible.  The Catholic Children's Bible Leader Guide is a resource that teaches catechists how to effectively use this bible with Children.  The guide has activities, prayers and helps for guiding children as they navigate through the bible.  The Leader Guide is filled with plenty of valuable information.  There's also an activity booklet that contains two reproducible activity pages for each featured bible story.  For every story, there is an activity page geared to younger children and one that is for older children.  In most cases, children in the 1st-2nd grade age range will be best suited to the level one activities while the level 2 activity sheets would be best for 3rd and 4th graders.  Each activity page has a section entitled "Seek and Find" that encourages children to go back to the story and look for something found on the story pages.

The Catholic Children's Bible also boasts a great companion app that can be used in the classroom or at home to further involve children in the stories.  The app features several activities for each bible story to  engage children.  There's even an option to have the Read It!, Understand It! and Live It! passages read to you by the app.  This is great for younger children who aren't yet old enough to read independently, however, there are some activities that may be too challenging for very young children.  There are plenty of fun activities in this app that will challenge even some of the older children.  The Catholic Children's Bible App is available as four different downloads.  Each set has it's own set of bible stories.

I could see using this app with my kindergarten religious education class.  The children could listen to the story and it's explanation and then could retell the story in their own words.  I plan on incorporating some of the bible stories from this app into my lesson plans for the upcoming school year.  I think it will be a hit with the children.

I was provided with a review copy of The Catholic Children's Bible and it's companion resources by the publisher, Saint Mary Press in exchange for my honest review.

App Review: Easter Hunt

I was recently provided with an opportunity to review an app designed for iPad and iPhone.  The app is called Easter Hunt.  It's an app that seeks to combine the fun of an Easter Egg hunt with the Easter story.  In this app, children can search a colorful springtime theme for hidden Easter eggs.  Once the egg is found you need to perform a certain task to crack the egg to reveal a portion of the Easter Story.

Let me start off by saying that I like the overall concept of this app.  It combines the secular fun of Easter with it's true meaning.  In theory, this app should be a winner.  In actual practice I feel the app needs some more work to be executed well.

Since I have both an iPhone and an iPad I tried Easter Hunt out on both devices.  On the iPhone the screens that contained the Easter story had poor rendering.  What I mean by this is as you scroll through the text you would get flashes of light and breaks in the text and background.  This problem did not exist when  I read the text on the iPad.  One thing that frustrated me, my children and my husband as we tested out this app was how slow it was.  The app is slow and unresponsive.  By the time your child gets the gratification of finding the egg they will likely be bored.  If they're not, the act of cracking the egg to reveal the next part of the Easter story will likely frustrate them.  Some eggs crack easily the third time you perform the action (that's a perfect example of the app's unresponsiveness) and other's require a specific action to crack the egg.  Since it takes about 30 seconds for the instructions to slowly scroll across the bottom of the screen, little ones will be frustrated before they know what they're supposed to do.

The story/devotional portion of the app seems a bit too long winded for young children.  I have been teaching religious ed for a few years now and they respond best when you get to the point quickly and in a way that captivates them.  The devotionals in this app aren't going to grasp their attention in most cases.  My own kids, who eagerly drink in the daily readings we do from our children's bible during Lent for our Jesus tree were ready to move on after the first few lines of text.

My husband who is a IT architect by profession, and who also dabbles in app development as a hobby,  felt that the app wasn't intuitive.  He feels the poor rendering and unresponsiveness give the impression of poor memory management.

While I like the overall concept of the app, I cannot in good conscience recommend it.  If the current issues with the app's slow response time were resolved along with a revision of the devotional portion I would be more inclined to suggest this app to others.

I was provided with a free download of this app by it's creator, Square Smith, in exchange for my honest review.