Remodeling in Progress!

     This afternoon I'll be revising all 20 files for ebooks that are offered on our website.  They all need to have a different website URL put in, as we are changing ours (to www.gentleshepcurr.com).  Have been working on a website remodel, and over several months, have migrated our content over to a Weebly site.  You can see it up now, though I still have a couple of bugs to work out here and there.

     I'm excited about this move, because being on Weebly is FREE (no cost at all to set it up or maintain it, other than a domain name fee) and that means it will be easier for us to stay there indefinitely.  It also has a nice crisp look, and Weebly is really easy to work with, to put content on (if you've ever wanted to make a website for ANYTHING, this is a great wizard to experiment with!).

     The one downside to this move is that we will no longer have automatic delivery of ebooks-- when people order, we'll need to send them the ebooks after we receive payment from PayPal; a PayPal shopping cart is part of what Weebly offers, which is GREAT!  We have been using it already, but our former cart was pretty fancy and also handled doing automatic downloads of eproducts.

     OK... time to get to work on those file revisions . . . come visit the new site, and tell me what you think!  Let me know if you find any missing links or other problems, too-- THANKS A LOT; for a day or two we'll still have both sites up.  Then, the former URL (www.gentleshepherd.biz) will become a redirector to the new site.

Math With Fred

This morning James and I were reading his math lesson.  He's using Life of Fred textbooks, and is over half-way through the decimals book.  Just recently he started asking me to go through the lessons with him, even though they're written TO kids to read on their own (they are also written in a way that encourages kids to do all the correcting-- it's great!).  I'm not sure if he's asking me to read with him because he's needing help with math or because he wants someone to laugh with him about all the hilarious stories and language in this math textbook.

Huh, math textbooks funny?  Well, yes . . .  I wouldn't have thought so, either, because in my own school years, the textbooks we used for learning math seemed just barely tolerable. In teaching my own kids using many different programs and books, math has continued to seem like a necessary evil . . .

 . . . that is, until Fred came along . . .

Now, math is fun for me.  Not sure if it's always fun for James, as he still has to work all the problems . . . but it is much MORE fun than any other math book or program.

Thanks, Fred, for making math learning much more interesting and enjoyable.

And, you know what, since I've started doing these last few lessons I even remember things like how to find the area of a circle and a triangle-- things I NEVER remembered (beyond about 5 minutes) my whole life, whether in school math classes myself or in teaching math to my own kids.

It's said that laughter is a good medicine.  I think it's a good teacher, too. :)