Real Hero Stories for Kids

I want my kids to learn at an early age that living a life in which faith and daily living are inseparable IS THE NORMAL CHRISTIAN LIFE. To this end, I picked out ten biographies for our spring reading (from the forty-one available) in YWAM's Christian Heroes Then and Now series.  If defining Christian living had been all we accomplished, I would have been happy, but these books gave us so much more!

Reading the biographies aloud together quickly became what all three of us looked forward to each day.  It's simple reading, so I was thrilled to be able to share with my kids at age 5 and 7 the stories of Amy Carmichael, Corrie ten Boom, George Muller, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer that have shaped me so.  (For your own decision-making, Bonhoeffer's biography made the dullest story, which was quite surprising since everything else I've read by and about him has been tranformational for me.)  Reading these books now doesn't replace the kids reading the original works in a decade or so, but what great lessons they learned so young:

(in their words....)

*George Muller: "Prayers really work."

*Amy Carmichael: "Even when it gets hard, never give up."

*Corrie ten Boom: "Welcome everybody, even if they hurt you before."

*Eric Liddell: "You don't have to win a race in the Olympics to win a gold medal.  You can win God's medal."

I couldn't have been happier to read stories of missionaries like David Livingstone, Rowland Bingham, and Nate Saint for the first time and still get to count it as school time with my children!  In almost every story there came a point where we had to take a "reading break" because Mommy just needed to cry for a bit. 

If you choose to use these books for homeschooling, you can buy additional Unit Studies to expand the learning into several subjects.  For our purposes, though, we simply read the biographies with a map on-hand to discuss geography and a pencil, paper, and dictionary to write down unfamiliar words.  In ten books over five months, we accumulated 128 new vocabulary words. 

Today we're starting our last biography: C.S. Lewis, which we'll follow with the Chronicles of Narnia series this summer.  I've never read past the first Narnia book, so I could not be more excited! 

May you be abundantly blessed,