Samut Saring Ceylon - Pondering Li'l Pilgrim's Progress

Thu 10 Jul 2008 - Pondering Li'l Pilgrim's Progress

We have finally come to the conclusion of the journey of Christian as he enters the gates of the Celestial City in this timeless well-loved classic by John Bunyan. We enjoy Helen L. Taylor's popular simplified version while Vibrant Bea delights herself with the old English of the unabridged version by Christian Classics publication during free time. Still, she listens to our read-aloud anyway and loves it. Fuzzy listened to the human-voice audiobook from Librivox months ago but decided that my reading voice is a lot better. Thanks, Fuzzy, but not always and you know that!

Taylor's version is light and easy. Written for the younger reader, Taylor used simple vocabulary without missing the vital lessons that Bunyan had so carefully embedded in his story. My children, thus, loved Christian, the child pilgrim, almost instantly. To their simple hearts, Christian can be anyone of them. BUt I can not over-emphasize to them that Bunyan's inspiration came from nothing less than God's Word. So, if you they love The Pilgrim's Progress, they should "desire the sincere milk of the Word that they may grow thereby (1 Peter 2:2)."

This is one of our best read-alouds. What made it different? Apart from how the story unfolds from Christian's freedom from the City of Destruction to how he ,with his friends Faithful and Hopeful, made it to the Celestial City, Vibrant Bea and Fuzzy couldn't keep their imagination and creative juices from flowing. They got themselves busy with visual time-maps (we coined it from timeline and mind maps) as I read to them. Remember the mindmaps? We took that activity and added a different twist to it. They mapped out Christian's journey and added the time element to create a visual vertical timeline and mind map. Quite a mouthful, and thus the term time-map is born! (Ooops, just googled it and there IS a TimeMap software used in archeological field.) Same idea. Anyway, mine has a dash- or probably a hyphen? =)

Here is Vibrant Bea's work. A page is supposed to branch out from the left on the second panel but I am still figuring it out how to photo-stitch it with the rest.

Fuzzy is still working on his.