Free Old Fashioned Color-By-Numbers Preschool Sheets

These Mennonite coloring books are so cute! I'm going to order the first one, Color-By-Number For Little Hands - Number 1 (ages 3-5). My two year(2.10) old loved the cat and food sheets. I like that they have a few sample printables(click on "Look in the Book") so you can try them out with your little ones.

There are two others we enjoyed:

Color-By-Number For Little Hands - Number 2 (ages 4-6)

Birds - Color-By-Number

I helped with the more difficult ones, but she really enjoyed matching the colors to the numbers. I think it's because they provide large drawing spaces for very young children, and the pictures are simple, but appealing.

Have you seen the Little Jewel Books? These are wholesome hand drawn Amish/Mennonite books about nature, family values, and Christian lessons for young children. My son loved these, and now my daughters picks them up for me to read, often bypassing our Barney books! It surprised me, but I was glad because they teach as well as entertain.

Maybe it is our strong German background(Pennsylvania Dutch: Non-Mennonite), but we are so drawn to these Mennonite resources. The books feature rural scenes so similar to my grandparent's old home outside of Hellertown, Pa(Wassergas). I love the Pennsylvania countryside; it's in my blood even though I've never lived there. My grandparents sold their "gentleman's farm" in the 1980's, and sadly, have since passed away.

If you like wholesome children's books with simple drawings of farms, rural life, nature and animals, these resources will be a hit. They are very inexpensive as well!

Mulching the Garden Frugally

A local tree company delivered free mulch earlier this week, so we have been working on whittling down the huge pile. We got the front yard done and almost finished the backyard today. It's quite a bit of work, but the trade off is it doesn't cost us a dime.

If you can obtain free tree chips(mulch)from your municipality or a tree company, this is a very frugal way of keeping the garden beds moist during hot summers. It also keeps down the weeds, and makes the beds look "finished".

We don't water our garden, so mulching heavily is the only way we can keep a garden without paying large water bills. Our water bills since the drought last year as high enough without having to water the garden. We do water our little vegetable garden, but we use water from our rain barrel.

Free Children's Educational Resource: Kids.gov.com

See here: here.