Library Haul - Vocations Edition!

Linking up with Sweeping Up Joy for Library Haul!

I thought it would be fun to get some kids books relating to vocations this week (since it is National Vocations Awareness Week and all.) But I had somehow never noticed just how few books relating to Christianity are at my library.

So I widened it to saint stories.

Which widened to Christian holiday stories.

Which lead to grab-everything-remotely-and-I-mean-REMOTELY- related-to-the-Church!

Here's what I found.

I missed one book when taking this shot. But you get the sad idea...

With my super generous criteria I found a grand total of.....seven.  

This wouldn't be so bad if there were not a full 2.5 shelves of books about Judaism, and 1.5 for Islam (and we're only talking the children's section here).  I'm going to assume this was not an oversight, but the result of those communities being better about requesting book purchases. 

So I'm taking all the suggestions! Leave your favorite picture books for Catholic kids suggestions in the comments!

Here's what we have right now:

These are both very wordy, but have the benefit of beautiful illustrations.

This is one of the few technically Christmas books that made my cut. They needed to focus primarily on the religious person, their story of coming to that life, and maybe something cool about them.

St. Francis loved the image of the Holy Family so much that he invented the Nativity scene. We'll probably get this one again when setting up our Fisher-Price Little People Nativity Set during Advent.

Two different books about Pope Francis!

No other popes, but I'll take it!

Because the National Geographic kids book is a level one reader, it includes a bunch of phonetic spellings that John found hilarious. Namely: priest (preest), seminary (SEM-uh-ner-ee), and Jesuits (JEH-zoo-its). They found a lot of good photos of young Jorge Bergoglio too.

These turned out to be some of the best of the lot from a vocations standpoint.

This is one that barely made the cut, but came home because it was a cool concept and had nice illustrations. It's each of the Beatitudes, with multiple little pictures on each page demonstrating how you might show that Beatitude. It has very few words, but lots of opportunity for exploratory discussion with little kids. Even Therese was into this one.

For a vocations specific talk, you might focus on different orders or works that reflect that particular Beatitude.

This book is pretty hardcore Catholic, and I was honestly surprised (pleasantly) to find it at my library branch. I do love nice surprises!

While it is long and wordy, it depicts the founder of so much of the monastic tradition in a very human light. He had a sister he deeply loved. He didn't always relate to people in the most loving way- spending years learning to be "more kind than strict". I love St. Scholastica's line, "Isn't it funny, Brother, that you had to travel all over Italy to learn some of the things that I discovered by staying in one place!"

Help me out! What kids books do you love, that I can request for my library, to help expand the selection beyond these and CHRISTMAS! (Because that's what we're working with right now....)