U-Make Matching Cards

Our newest product is a set of farm animal matching cards. This is an e-book, and the animal card pages need to be printed out (twice, so you can play a matching game) on cardstock. It's easy to put the file on a jump drive and take it to a quick-print, if your computer doesn't do color.

These cards are very simple to make. After printing the pages, just cut them apart, following the gray guide lines. If you'd like them to be more durable, they can be laminated (usually this is available at a quick-print, too).

We use the cards with our middle grade kids (11 and 13) for Spanish practice; by the way, the words for all the animals' names and sounds are given on a couple pages of this e-book, for four different languages (English, Spanish, French, German).

They could also be used by younger children; memory match is a game for all ages.

To see some sample pages from this matching cards e-book, go here:  http://www.gentleshepcurr.com/toysgames.html

Stone Soup Homeschool Blog

Robin Foster Montoya of Stone Soup Homeschool Network has put an article I wrote as a guest contributor, on her blog and Facebook page. This is a more detailed account of our astronomy study, with lots of pictures made by Molly and James! Take a look!

http://www.stonesouphomeschool.com/1/post/2010/10/exploring-astronomy.html

Diligence I Have . . . Maybe not Patience!

        I don't remember asking God for patience . . . but that seems to be a recurring theme this year. Back in January, I had the silly notion that I could build a simple new website in about a month . . . the end of January seemed like a workable goal. Then it was the end of March . . . and then when I finally got the hang of how to build pages it was the end of summer. Got a long ways during summer-- but had a couple items to finish up, and beta testing, trouble-shooting, help from friends and family and God's sustaining hand . . . and now my end of September aims need readjustment.

        So even if I wasn't looking for it, I feel like patience is something I need-- like the children's song goes, "I need a little patience; I need it right now . . ."

        This journey of website building has been filled with learning more . . . learning to follow processes that took doing, and then re-doing . . . finding that if I tried one more time a different way (the right way) the eureka moment would finally come. Seeing the need to diligently follow every pre-planned step but also make some unforeseen twists in the trail . . .

        I'm so glad to have learned (in a basic kind of way) how to make web pages, and how to make them a united website. Now we are truly at the final stages (I think!) of this website launch. But I'm not going to wager a guess on when! Just going to keep creeping along, and like the tortoise in Aesop's fable, will eventually get there.

        But for me, this really isn't a race. That's something this year has taught me. So it's OK if things don't happen as fast as I'd like. I might even need to take a couple of detours along the road, or have a long snooze like the rabbit-- but I can still "get there."