The Biggest Story (the book) came to us highly recommended a while back. It does a great job of drawing out the thread that ties all of Scripture together: Creation, the Fall, the continual promises of a Redeemer, the coming of that Redeemer, etc., and the ongoing battle between the serpent and his seed, and the seed of the woman.
Unlike The Jesus Storybook Bible, which is a compilation of separate Bible stories but shows how each one points to Christ, this is one single story. It comes in “chapters,” but it’s clearly one unified story.
And the illustrations are gorgeous. I mean, Caldecott-worthy. The style is reminiscent of Baltic folk art, and the illustrations are filled with vivid color.
The only downside is that (obviously) non-readers can’t read it for themselves. But now there are CD and DVD versions!
The Biggest Story: How the Snake Crusher Brings Us Back to the GardenGet ItThe Biggest Story: The Animated Short Film (DVD)Get ItThe Biggest Story: The Audio Book (CD)Get It
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The Biggest Story CD & DVD
The CD is is pretty much what you would expect — an audio version of the book. This is great for little ones to be able to listen to the story while they follow along with the book. (Of course you could play it without the book, but that’s not as much fun. Handy for in the car, though.)
The DVD integrates the same audio with animated video based on the illustrations in the book. The kids liked it, although I think they would have appreciated it more if we’d watched about half at a time. I did think the sound could have been mixed a little better; there were places where the music was loud enough that it made the narration difficult to hear. Overall, though, we were pretty pleased with it.
The theology is sound. There are a few places where maybe I would personally have chosen a different word, but there’s nothing I felt the need to censor/adjust, which is saying a lot. Christian kids’ books have a tendency to louse up their theology or otherwise sacrifice accuracy in their attempts to simplify, and that isn’t an issue here.
The story consists of 10 chapters, each 2-3 minutes long. This adds up to a total run time of 26 minutes. This is not terribly long, but given the nature of the story (it’s kind of a long story — I mean, it does cover thousands of years’ worth of history!), that still was a little long for my youngest children, and in the future I might break it up. Both the CD and the DVD come with small posters (one double-sided poster each) from the book’s illustrations. (The village/city is my personal favorite.)
I definitely recommend this as an excellently-done introduction for children to the overall plan of redemption.
Win It!
I’ve been provided with the opportunity to give away another CD/DVD pair to one of you! Follow the instructions in the Rafflecopter widget below (if you’re on mobile and don’t see it or it looks weird, you might need to move to a “real” computer) to enter.
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