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Once there was a girl who had no clue what Shutterfly was. Then she had a baby. Then she met a wonderful woman while nursing her baby at church. That woman quickly became her friend. And then she soon realized that her friend was full of amazing and wonderful Shutterfly tips and tricks. Now this girl is a Shutterfly addict.
Many think of Shutterfly as a place where you can go to print photos and make photo gifts, but friends I am here to tell you that Shutterfly can be so much more.
Montessori is all about following the interests of the child and one of the many interests R has is animals. I had a free code for 101 free prints from Shutterfly and decided that since I didn’t need any actual pictures printed that I would take advantage of the code and make some animals cards for her. I made a card for every animal I could think, including the male/female/baby versions of a lot of the animals and when I still had some prints left over I created familiar faces cards for her as well.
I created the photo cards in powerpoint and saved them as jpeg files. Since these cards were for my own personal use, I found various images from around the web and saved them and inserted them onto each card. I tried looking for pictures that had a white background so that the focus was on the animal not the background. I then used a basic font and labeled each card. Once I was done creating all of the pictures, I saved each slide of my powerpoint as a jpeg image and then I uploaded the files to Shutterfly and had them printed as 4x6 images. The slide size in powerpoint was set to 4x6 so there was no risk of having anything cut off during printing. Once I received the photos, I laminated them all using my laminator and cut out all of the cards and then I used a corner rounder to to make the edges round instead of pointy and sharp.
So far we have only given her the farm animal cards and she loves to go through them and tell us what each animal is and what it says. Her favorite though is to quiz us on them like we quiz her. “What’s this?” and then she giggles because she knows she is being funny. I don’t want the cards to become overwhelming for her so she will only have x amount at a time. As she grows we can leave more of them out at a time for her to go through. We decided to leave the cards as individual cards vs putting them on a ring so that she could more easily look through them. She also loves to move things from place to place so allowing her to have free access to her cards allows her to capitalize on this interest as well.
We will also be moving towards using the cards for her to match her animals up to and then eventually I will be making them into Montessori 3 part cards for her to work on connecting the word to the picture.
These cards will definitely grow with her and I am sure I will find other things I want to make cards for overtime.
They also tag along all over including the grocery store and on our outside adventures. You never know when you will just feel like going through naming animals :)
Some helpful hints on using SHutterfly codes: When using a free print code on SHutterfly, unless you have other things to purchase to help add up to the free shipping, or you receive a free shipping code from someplace, then you will want to take a peek at what the shipping costs are. For me I only ordered 99 prints because shipping was a whole dollar cheaper than getting all 101 prints the code allowed and since I didn’t have a free shipping code or a need to purchase $39 dollars worth of stuff to get free shipping this was my cheapest option. So always make note of the shipping costs.
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