My First Review! You Can Draw Bible Stories for Kids

This post contains affiliate links. More information is available at the end of the post.

Folks, this is exciting. This is my first review!

A couple of months ago, I received an email from Sandy Silverthorne who has published a book with Harvest House Publishers. He gave me a description of his book, You Can Draw Bible Stories for Kids and the web site. He wanted to send me a free advance copy for possible review!

This is the first time someone has sent me a free product to review because of my blog. This is exciting for me! I have received a lot of positive feedback about my blog in the past year and have recently decided to give it more time and energy and to try and do more with it.

I have been doing a lot of reading about blogs. When it comes to reviews, professional advice always says the same: only review products that you really believe in and that you would naturally use.

It was meant to be that Sandy Silverthorne sent me this particular product as my first to review. It's perfect because it meets a need in homeschooling that we already had!

As part of our faith lessons, several times I have read a Bible story to the boys and asked them to illustrate it. This hasn't been very successful. For the most part, they couldn't think of their own ideas of what to draw and would just copy the illustration in the book. They both really like drawing, but are not confident in their stills yet. They get impatient with themselves and want to be better at drawing than they are. This doesn't make for a very fun lesson. For that reason, I hadn't done this in a while.

Silverthorne's book uses this same idea, but helps the children form new cartooning skills. It gives simple instructions, taking the fear and frustration out of drawing for my boys. They enjoyed the Bible story as well as the characters they learned how to draw. They had fun!

Enjoying our lesson

Joshua proud of his work

Even Teresa was interested :)

Overall, the lesson was a great success and we will definitely continue to use the book as we read Bible stories. If you are looking for a new way to make teaching your children Bible stories fun, I would definitely recommend this book. The book was released in February and so far, has five stars for reviews on Amazon.

We enjoyed the product so much that I WILL BE HAVING MY FIRST FREE GIVEAWAY SOON, giving away a free copy of this book. Stay tuned!

Thank you, Sandy Silverthorne!

In the interest of full disclosure, some of the links in this post are 'affiliate links.' This means that if you click on the link and purchase the item, I receive an affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend products that I believe in and personally use. Your purchases through these links help support Mamma Vintage. Thank you for your support!

Mamma Can't Live Without . . .

Reading a book from daddyread.com

So, I've realized that one of the most helpful things I find about reading others' blogs is their advise about the tools they use for everyday life. I have discovered so many wonderful things this way! There is such an abundance of information out there, making it difficult to discern the good from the bad. And when I look at my life, I realize that there are many things that I go back to again and again, so I will be featuring a variety of things on my blog every week or so.

For instance, Mamma can't live without . . .

High Quality Children's Books Web Sites

Speaking of abundance, how about children's books? Sometimes I wonder what you have to do in order to get one published, because I'm sorry, but the majority of them seem like crap. Have you ever had your child latch onto one of those awful ones and ask you to read it fifty thousand times? No fun. But the truth is that there are some AMAZING children's books out there if you know where to look. The trick is sorting the crap from the awesomeness so that your child has the right books to pick from. When your child chooses a book over and over again that has you laughing till you snort, recalling your childhood or  getting slightly teary, well, that's a win win!

As a homeschooling mom, we literally go through hundreds of books. Thank God for our library system. The Snohomish Library System alone is reason to move up north. Can I just say no late fees! We honestly could not afford homeschooling without our library. That's a whole other Mamma Can't Live Without.

So I regularly check three different web sites to get ideas for children's books. Then I just put them on hold at the library.

The first great site I found is www.daddyread.com/

This is an awesome site because it divides books into age level, it gives thorough descriptions of the books, it will tell you if a book has content that some parents may find a little inappropriate and it tells you if there is an audiobook.

The second is www.boysread.org

Finding books that boys truly enjoy can sometimes be difficult. The books listed on this web site are AWESOME. I have told a few other moms about it and all have been so excited to see their little man get into reading.

Lastly, I love www.readkiddoread.com

This web site divides books into age levels as well as into genres. It includes nonfiction books, which my boys really like. Also, it seems to be the web site that most often puts up new books.

Happy reading!!!