I no longer have children that age in my home, but at church this year I have been serving in children's ministry once a month and in MOPs (Mothers of Preschoolers) twice a month. I volunteered to read this book to my little charges!
The children in my audience were actually about age 2. I was amazed at how easy it was to read this book and keep the young ones' attention.
What I saw immediately when I received the book was illustrations with deep detail. I wasn't sure these illustrations would keep toddlers' attention. I was wrong.
As I read this book to a little girl on my lap, I could see the beauty of the way this book is written. For very young children, you can read through the entire book reading just the first line of each page: "A is for ANT". I wondered if this was where I would need to stop for a 2 year old. It was not. I was able to read the entire page on some pages! That means I read all the way down to that Bible verse on the bottom! For the most part, though, for this young age I read like "X is in FOXES: In holes they have a bed; But for us Jesus suffered this: No place to lay his head."
I also liked the illustrations around the edge of the pages. On "B is for BOW" I liked asking questions like, "Can you find a frog?" or pointing to the bear and asking, "Do you know what that animal is?"
The next time I did childcare during church I got to read the book to a 5-year-old boy. Again, the story totally held his attention. Also, it was fun to note how many more of the animals this little boy knew than the 2-year-old girl had known. He knew most of them! Not only that, it was almost like I could hear his brain-gears working overtime when I made a correction on his guess, like when I said, "That's called a 'starfish'."
On "A is for ANT" I had fun seeing how high kids could count by asking, "How many ants do you see?" For the 2-year-olds it was pretty predictably a count to about 10. I didn't have the older boy count them. I didn't think of it that time.
