Books like Leading Little Ones to God: A Child's Book of Bible Teachings

Two stars looks a bit harsh but I am following the Goodreads definition - 'It was OK'. I wasn't reading it with kids and I wasn't reading it as slowly as it was meant, so perhaps I am not really in a position to judge, especially when I see so many other people have rated it highly and claim to have used it effectively with their children. I was just reading it to get a feel for it. For me the book didn't really work. The chapters felt too brief, the narratives too uninteresting, the writer's thoughts too disjointed and her line of thinking hard to follow. Where a really engaging Biblical narrative could have been delivered to engage the child's interest, a story was summarised in a few brief sentences which didn't really hold together very well. If I was a child I am not sure that I would have been able to follow what was going on in many of those narratives. To me as an adult they didn't seem to make much sense.The manner of speaking felt very patronising, aimed at very young children, and yet at the same time the words being used, the concepts being taught, felt like they were way over the heads of such young children, and not clearly explained, the words not clearly defined. I can't imagine a young child being able to follow it very well. The book was arranged rather like a systematic theology. Again, for me that didn't really work. The narratives didn't follow on from one another. You just jumped around from one Book of the Bible to another in no particular order with a very brief narrative each time - never enough narrative to be engaging and to make a child want to hear another Bible story. I would rather have had the narratives following on from one another in chronological order, linked together, so that they gave a clearer picture of Biblical history and the sequence of events. I did wonder if the book was written with the assumption that the children being taught were already very familiar with all the main Bible stories, and that all that was needed here was to bring out Christian doctrine in a more systematic form, without the need for telling them the full stories in great detail all over again.I'm not writing the book off as a complete waste of time, but I personally think it is unusable in its present form, but it could work as a basis for parents to prepare their own lessons, to rewrite the chapters in more comprehensible language, in fuller detail and with a more flowing style, and in a more engaging form. The questions posed in the 'Something to talk about' sections often had me stumped. Based on the very short piece of narrative and teaching just read to the child in each chapter, I wasn't sure how the child was meant to be in a position to answer, or even to understand, some of these questions being asked - and I wondered how many parents would even feel capable of answering them correctly. The prayers written with thee's and thou's now feel very dated. The hymns might generally be well-known ones, but they didn't always feel suitable for young children to sing, either because of the vocabulary used, or because of the sentiments supposedly being expressed/professed by the singer - which oughtn't to be sung by an unbelieving child. Maybe the book would just act as a useful tool to inspire thoughtful parents as to how to best try to introduce Christian doctrines to young children in a manner they might be able to understand, and provide suggestions as to which Bible narratives could be used to do it effectively. This book is a good starting point for preparing lessons but I can't imagine I would ever use it exactly as it stands. But then it feels right that parents should put effort into preparing lessons for their own children, and shouldn't just rely on other people's works. Parents need to get into the habit of preparing lessons for their children if they are to get into the habit of having regular and sustained family worship.