Benjamin's Box

Rating:
Summary: Church Reading
Review: I heard a mother tell of reading this book to her children for Easter. My own son is now an adult ( no children yet) but I felt so strongly about the message of the book that I am buying it for my husband's grandchildren.

Rating:
Summary: Share this book with your kids!
Review: This book is a tradition for our family -- our kids eagerly anticipate getting it out of the "Easter" box every spring. The illustrations are very beautiful yet very kid-friendly -- I *loved* the fact that they show children who (despite their era-appropriate clothing) look like any child you'll see today riding down the street on a skateboard. Also, Jesus has dark hair -- the illustrator didn't turn our thoroughly Jewish Lord into a blond haired, blue eyed European as so many artists do. Kudos for that! I can't recommend this book highly enough!

Rating:
Summary: Kids LOVE This!
Review: This book is most effectively used with the Resurrection Eggs sold by FAMILY LIFE. The egg carton contains 12 colorful plastic Easter eggs and each has a small item in it which corresponds to an event which happened to Jesus from Palm Sunday through Easter Sunday.

Benjamin's Box is a story about a young boy who follows Jesus during this most important week and he picks up small reminders of the events and puts them in a special box his grandfather gave him. The pages in the book have a colored Easter egg at the top which corresponds to an egg in the Resurrection Egg package. The child finds that egg and opens it to discover the item that Benjamin just picked up.

I used the Benjamin's Box/Resurrection Egg combination with my 5 year old son's Church School class on Palm Sunday. THEY LOVED IT!!! I hid the eggs and let them find them. We then sat down, read the story, and whoever had the corresponding egg for a particular page opened it told how what they found went along with the story. When the story was done, we mixed the eggs all up and opened them at random - the kids remembered how the items related to the story of Jesus after listening to it just one time! I was very impressed (and so were their parents).

I can't recommend this book and the Resurrection Eggs highly enough.