Book Review – The Silent Governess by Julie Klassen

I recently received this book and I am so glad I did! This was an excellent read, and I enjoyed it very much .
I am a fan of British literature and Jane Austen happens to be one of my favorite authors. Julie Klassen has been compared to Jane Austen, and normally I do not enjoy books that are written in imitation of someone else’s writing style. I have to say, though, that Julie Klassen is a fine author in her own right, and has a wonderful style all her own. She has a good understanding of the time period about which she writes and the characters in this book were extremely well developed and “real” to me. I could hardly put this book down and ended up reading it within 2 and a half days of receiving it!
Olivia Keene is fleeing from her hometown and a secret involving something horrible she believes she has done. In the course of finding her way to a new home she overhears a secret regarding Lord Bradley of Brightwell Court. Lord Bradley discovers her and after some thought (and an incident in which Olivia is nearly strangled and thereby temporarily loses her voice) decides to place her in his home as a servant so he can keep an eye on her. She is ordered to remain silent and all the other servants believe she is a mute.
This book is full of mystery regarding Olivia’s past, and this is interwoven into the mystery surrounding Lord Bradley’s birth. The mistrust that the two initially feel for one another eventually turns into something quite different as their secrets bring them together.
I enjoyed the suspense, the mystery, and the romance of this book very much and look forward to reading more books by this talented author.
Thank you to Bethany House Publishing Company for sending me this book to review!

ABC upper and lower case matching cards – Printable

Sometimes I like to play simple little games with M.  We print out a grid, or a do-a-dot page, or a magnet page, and I print letters or numbers or whatever we are working on in the spaces.  (You could do it for sight words, simple math equations, colors, shapes… lots of stuff.) 

I’m always stumped though, when it’s letters we are working on, about how to make this into a game, because a game is the best way to get M to participate in just about anything. 
I could just call out a random letter and have him find and stamp it out on his page, but this isn’t very engaging for him and he hasn’t been interested when I’ve approached it that way.  I wanted to find some ABC cards that had separate cards for upper and lowercase letters.  There are a lot out there (and they look great!) that have the upper and lowercase letter on the same card (where you can match up two halves of the same card in a matching game)… but that wasn’t quite what I was looking for.  I want to be able to work on lower case and upper case at the same time… or not… or match a “mama” letter card to a “baby” letter card… or just whatever!

Anyway, here’s what I came up with:

Now when we play our little grid games I just plug in the letters I want to focus on.

Sometimes these are all lower case letters, sometimes they are all upper case, and sometimes they are both!  Then I go through the cards and pull out the ones we’ll be needing.  I shuffle them, M cuts them :), and we take turns drawing one from the top of the deck and then find it on our page.  Whoever gets all their spaces filled in first wins.  It’s a great, fun game, and while M is enjoying himself I know he’s much more likely to retain what he’s learning!  

We also use these to play matching games.  Having the same picture on the big letter and little letter cards is a nice help in being able to match up those mamas and babies. ;)
We’ll use these for other things too… phonic sorts and who knows what else.   I’m open for suggestions too, as always!

If you are interested in printing these for your own use, you can download them here.

Have a beautiful day! :)