Tell Me About The Catholic Faith (and more) – Book Reviews

Today, I’m reviewing some of the books from the Ignatius Press / Magnificat line for children. Overall, I’ll say that I’m impressed. It always puts a smile on my face to see quality stuff put out for Catholic kids. 🙂

I opened the Tell Me About The Catholic Faith book and was instantly thrilled with the adorable and colorful illustrations throughout the book!

One of the things I love the most about actually Catholic stuff for kids is I don’t have to worry about the message being… well… off. Whenever we have materials made by protestant faiths, I’m always worried about the message, especially when pertaining to the Eucharist. In the first paragraph, it talks about how many books there are in the Bible. I thought, “Yay! It will actually  have the right number of books because it’s Catholic!”

*Updated to Say* I got an email telling me that this typo is fixed in the new books that are shipping- yay!

For anyone who doesn’t know off the top of their head, there are 73 books total in the Catholic Bible. This was pretty disappointing. I haven’t noticed any other errors in this book, but I haven’t yet read them cover to cover. (FYI- This is a typo- it is not the number of books in the Protestant Bible.)

Overall, I do recommend owning this book. It is visually appealing, has great information for Catholic kids (and adults) alike, and each 2 page spread is self-contained, making it perfect for including with short lessons. I wish I had this book last year for Lydia’s First Communion prep. I have totally recommended it to all of my Catholic friends. Lydia has read most of it completely on her own, and loves the comic book pages the most!

There are several different illustrators, so different pages have a different feel, and I like that.

Here are the topics covered in this book:

• Includes basics of Old Testament, and New Testament, and ties them together nicely from a Catholic perspective
• Includes Saint stories
• Has colorful maps and pictures of Historical objects, cities, etc to help kids picture things
• Goes over the highlights of the life of Jesus- all from a Catholic perspective
• Covers Pentecost and the Holy Spirit
• Goes over the evolution of Christians
• Talks about the Protestant and Catholic reformations and is honest that the Church did have issues at the time. We have a lot of Protestant friends, so I’m glad this was included.
• Covers bringing Catholicism all over the world
• Has 2 pages about where it touches on people who don’t believe in God, and I feel that they do a very good job with this. I’m glad for this information to come from me- in today’s world I can’t exactly shield them from these realities.
• Shows a child-friendly map of the Vatican, talks about the Pope, and the Church
• Goes over our beliefs as Catholics, other religions, how many Christians there are in the world, and that Catholics are the largest Christian group worldwide
• Has pages about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit
• Goes over sin. I’m picky about how sin is presented to my children, and I think this book does a good job.
• It has a lesson on how we should live like Jesus, a 2 page spread about Mary, talks about Saints in general, and goes over prayer.
• Then is has a section on making good choices in your life, sharing, forgiving, and working hard.
• It has an overview page about the 7 Sacraments, then one lesson on each one individually. (Although for vocations, they only mention a religious order or marriage, which I feel like leaves out people that are simply called to a single lifestyle.)
• Covers all the things you need to know before moving onto deeper things
• Shows the Liturgical year (but not in a traditional Liturgical calendar, which I don’t have a problem with, but it seems like a weird choice to me)

There are a handful of things in this book that I feel like are worded a little weird, but nothing too glaring.

They also have a book that’s Tell Me About the Catholic Faith for Small Children. This book is also cute, but everything in it is extremely brief.

It covers the same material as the one for older kids, but there is just a sentence or 2 about each thing.

Overall, if I were spending my own money on these, I would just get the one for older kids and skip the one for the littles. There are plenty of books that are more appealing to small kids, and it seems a little redundant to own both of them.

I also got to review their set of graphic novel style Bible books, and these were a huge hit here!

Kids (even reluctant readers) love the comic book style format with tons of pictures! These books also have contained page-spreads, so there is a definite beginning and end to each story. I love that because it means kids don’t have to read it cover to cover. It’s also perfect to pull off the shelf and refer to for a specific Bible story.

Lydia (age 8) loves to read these independently and is becoming more familiar with her Bible stories.

Again, it is nice to have books that are actually from a Catholic perspective so I don’t have to worry about the message of the stories being weird.

There are 4 books in this set: The Parables of Jesus, Gospel Stories, Acts of the Apostles, and the Miracles of Jesus. I like how the books are divided because it’s organically teaching my kids the definition of a parable, a miracle, etc.

I recommend all of these for reading-age children, mostly because I find it really obnoxious to read graphic-novel style books out loud to my kids. The ideal age group I would recommend these for would be from 6-10.

It’s hard to tell in these pictures, but the books are super high quality. The covers are slick and almost a little puffy. They really seem like they’re going to last through all my  kids. 🙂

Updated With Notebooking Pages

Over several years, I ended up using Tell Me About The Catholic Faith as a spine for our religious curriculum and creating an entire pack of Catholic notebooking pages to go with each lesson! You can find the 130 page pack of Catholic notebooking pages here.

Disclaimer: I did receive all of these books for free in exchange for a review. I do not recommend things to my readers that I don’t like- all opinions shared are my own.