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This one contains stories like "St Elizabeth" and "Our Lady's Flower Society". This book contains dictation exercises with some of the lessons, as well as vocabulary, and comprehension.

This one contains stories like "The Power of the Blessed Sacrament" and "Rip Van Wynkle". It also contains pronunciation, dictation, vocabulary, and comprehension with the lessons.

I found this volume very useful for early reading practice with my first-grade daughter. We were able to move into this after she finished the Bob Books. The advantage I saw to this particular primer in contrast with the later series (Cardinal or Faith and Freedom) was that it was much harder for her to guess the words because of either the pictures or the heavy repetition so common in other early readers. The passages are very short, although not particularly story like. Some of the phraseology was rather archaic, such as "Has a boy the jug? A boy has not the jug." (p. 15) We didn't find this to be a big problem. There were also some stories where the perspective is so different that it's almost shocking to our modern ears. For example, a story about seals on pg. 60 indicates that children of that time might have been more familiar with seals from their skin used as clothing than being "acquainted" with the animals themselves.

Since we used this volume just for reading practice, we skipped the segments on vocabulary, word recognition and introductory cursive.

Additional review: This is actually two books in one binding - the Primer and Book One. My daughter dove into the Primer right away and is working her way through it. Each lesson begins with the new words listed with phonetic notations. Most of the lessons have some of the text reproduced in cursive writing. The pictures are beautiful and the stories are wonderful and steeped in Catholic culture. The stories in these two are very short and not really full stories. (N.H., 1999)

This is a very nice children's prayer book illustrated with full-color cartoon-like pictures. The book includes:

• Traditional prayers like the Hail Mary, Our Father and Morning Offering
• Prayers of the Saints, like Prayer of Saint Francis and Breastplate of St. Patrick
• Prayers and Mysteries of the Rosary (including the Luminous mysteries)
• Psalms from the Bible
• Some special prayers written just for children
• Gentle invitations for children to talk to God in their own words too.
• A segment on "Going to Confession" which includes instructions as well as prayers
• "Stuff Every Catholic Kid Should Know" like Spiritual and Corporal Works of Mercy and the Ten Commandments
• "Prayers from the Mass"

I was pleased to see that the Scripture Citations are from the Revised Standard Version: Catholic Edition (the best modern translation of the Bible). This book is particularly well-suited for a First Communion or Birthday gift for a godchild or for parishes or Catholic organizations to give as gifts to First Communicants. It would be nice to put such an attractive and substantial booklet in the hands of every child (so many Catholic children grow up without understanding many of the basics covered by this book). The publisher has made this more feasible by offering it in softcover at such a reasonable price of under four dollars!