A Christmas Hamper: A Volume of Pictures and Stories for Little Folks

VariousProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.5
Word count
26K words
Chapters
3

Tags

English Originals Children's Literature Family BondsComing of AgeSpiritual ComfortFestive AtmosphereIllustrated GuideHeartwarming NarrativeFairy TalesChristmas ThemeParent-Child Reading

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.A Christmas Hamper: A Volume of Pictures and Stories for Little Folks by VariousAuthor: Various,Language: English, Class: PZ: Language and Literatures: Juvenile belles lettres, Release Date: Oct 17, 2016

Editor's review

This is a Christmas-themed collection of pictures and stories for young children, made up of several short tales and illustrations—a typical holiday children's book. Its value lies in its lightness: short pieces, self-contained units, and plenty of pictures, making it suitable for bedtime stories or shared parent-child reading around Christmas. The collection format offers flexible choices; children can jump between stories by interest, and adults need not read the whole book at once. As a public-domain ebook, it preserves the linguistic charm and holiday atmosphere of older children's literature, letting children experience the narrative style of traditional Christmas stories. Note that the plots and wording of such old children's books bear the marks of their era, and some expressions may differ from current usage; discussing them during shared reading can itself become a talking point. Overall, it is better suited as holiday-atmosphere reading and a medium for parent-child interaction than as a systematic language-learning textbook.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. During shared reading, choose one or two pieces each time; after reading, ask questions about the pictures and let the child retell or continue the story.
  2. In the two weeks before the holiday, read one piece a day and combine it with activities such as decorating the Christmas tree to create a sense of ritual.
  3. When encountering old-fashioned expressions, don't interrupt; after reading, explain them in modern terms to help the child understand.
  4. Have the child guess the story from the pictures first, then read the text to compare, exercising observation and expression.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3

FAQ

What age is this book suitable for? Judging by the picture-text format and short-piece structure, it is better suited to preschool through early primary school children. The specifics depend on the child's English foundation and attention span; parents are advised to look through one or two pieces first to judge the language difficulty before deciding how to read together.
Is it a picture book or a text book? It is a collection of pictures and text, containing illustrations and short stories; the illustrations carry much of the narrative, but the amount of text varies by piece. It can be seen as an illustrated short-story collection rather than a picture-dominated book for very young children.
Can children read it on their own? The original English text poses some difficulty for non-native children; for younger children, shared reading or an adult reading first is recommended. Primary school children with some English foundation can try reading the short pieces themselves, with parents helping to explain old-fashioned wording.

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About the author

Various Author

Various is not a real person but a collective attribution used in book cataloging and databases for works with multiple authors, commonly applied to anthologies, compilations, or publications with too many contributors to list individually. On this Chinese book site, this attribution covers as many as 3,387 titles, spanning encyclopedic entries, historical documents, and trial records. Representative works include several volumes of the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the record of the trial of the major war criminals before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Available public information is limited: nationality, birth and death dates, and common categories are not clearly recorded, making it difficult to summarize a unified writing style or personal biography. Readers should understand it as a cataloging convention rather than a single author.