Links and More Links

Barb has a great list of bird stuff. I downloaded bird notebooking pages and the feeder birds coloring book. Monkey loves birds, and I think this will be a great addition to the work we're doing with birds right now. Seeing as he's so interested, I'm seriously considering making our 6 weeks of birds into more birds than that. I'll have to ask him and see what he says.

Kate linked to this great article. She loved this line: "Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work." I love this other one: "Devoting yourself to something means shutting out other things." I find shutting out the other things to be painful: all those might-have-beens. So then I try to do everything, and I wear myself to a nub, drive my husband crazy, and... don't do any of them well. I've been thinking lately that I'm going to have to let some of my hobbies go in order to do a good job with this whole homeschooling thing. That's hard. But it's priorities. Desires guide priorities, and priorities guide choice, and that becomes my life. To create a priority (I'm going to homeschool my boys and do the very best job I can possibly do at it) means to shut out other things (I will never be a concert pianist, though I once dreamed that dream). And that's OK. Right, even.

The Dread Pirate Grasshopper Has His First Epiphany: The Equuschick on Justice and Mercy. I love reading her stuff, and this one is particularly good.

An unusual angle on the whole socialization thing.

Palm Sunday Coloring

A nice depiction of the Triumphal Entry.

Constitution Day

Some links. So far I'm still looking for an activity that would work for a pre-schooler.

White House Kids
Constitution Unit Study. Grades 3-8
Miscellaneous activities for learning about America. Early and upper elementary
Create a Class Constitution. Grades 6-12


Ah-ha! Something for littler ones!
Patriotic Coloring Sheets
Fourth of July Coloring Sheets. Includes the signing of the Consitution

Another Batch of Coloring Sheet Links

Printable Coloring Pages - a pretty good collection of animal pages, some Angel and Bible verse pages, holiday coloring pages with a few projects mixed in here and there, including some smaller holidays.

Three R's Coloring Pages - these look like coloring and activity pages, covering shapes, colors, letters comparisons (big & small) and numbers.

Previously posted coloring pages are linked to near the bottom of the sidebar.

Cool Coloring Pages

We're doing a fun Enrichment activity this week, we're making quiet books. The idea is to find something for each letter of the alphabet. Some picture. Well, my printer's not so nice, and I don't have back issues of the Friend laying around home. Actually, we don't get the Friend yet, so there are no current issues laying around either. And that's where the ladies suggested that we get our pictures for this book from. So I went online and I looked for coloring pages. I decided that I'd like to start with stories of Jesus. That's always a good place to start. So I googled "New Testament coloring pages" and clicked around until I found this cool site. Now, it's in Dutch, which makes life a little bit interesting. But the pictures are a lot higher quality than a lot of the coloring pages that I've found when I googled just "Bible coloring pages." A lot of the art on the English sites needs some work. Not that I can do any better. (But my sister could, if she wanted to.) Anyway, I'm planning to look through there and see what sort of cool pictures I can find. So far, I've printed out this one that's kinda fun: it's Christ blessing the children. I'd link to it, but I don't know which one it was anymore. Did I mention that it's all in Dutch?