The First Christmas is a book written by Georgie and illustrated by Anna C. Leplar. The book is suitable for ‘Early Readers’. Blue Early Readers are perfect for sharing and reading together. This is a red Early Reader which is the next step on your reading journey. It was released on 8 November 2012 and published by Orion Publishing. The book is paperback containing about 64 pages. The font is a good reading size, simple words and easy to read by school children. Each page contains a fair amount of sentences and a lots of great illustrations of the ancient times with charming soft watercolours.
The book tells the story of the birth of Jesus and how a bright star guides the shepherds, the angels and the three kings to the lowly stable where he is born with delightful simplicity. This book is designed to make a great introduction to the Nativity story for very young children. Mr K is not a strong reader and he took a few readings to complete the book. He still finds it hard to read some of the words but he is getting there. There are a few difficult words like Nazareth, Bethlehem etc. At the back of the book, there are questions to prompt the child to remember some of the things that happened in the story. Like “who gave Mary a message from God?” etc. This is quite helpful to consolidate what has been read.
We are not Christians and have not taught him about Jesus. However, I do think it’s good to learn about other religions besides our own Buddhism. As usual, we got bombarded by questions from Mr K, such as what is the use of the three special gifts and why Mary is bearing the child and Joseph is not the real dad. For the latter, we just told him this is God’s wish.
Disclosure: I received this book from the publisher for free. However, they have not paid me for this review, and they do not exercise any editorial control over my review or anything else on this site.