We received an Acrylic Paint Set for Artists from the Ander Blake Company to review. They are a wonderful set that I would highly recommend for any painter, whether you're new or experienced. As a starter set, it was perfect for our family. My children love to paint and we have enjoyed taking these paints outside with a canvas and a picnic blanket.
The Color Gallery Acrylic Paint set includes 12 tubes in Titanium White, Lemon Yellow, Medium Yellow, Yellow Ochre, Burnt Sienna, Scarlet Red, Crimson, Midnight Blue, Blue Lake, Light Green, Forest Green, and Mars Black. To make orange we used Lemon Yellow and Scarlet Red. To make dark purple we used Scarlet Red and Midnight Blue, and Crimson and Blue Lake for light purple.
Since this set does not contain all the colors that my children are use to in a paint set, this was a great set for them to explore color mixing. Typically we use water and food coloring, which was good for introducing them to the concept, but it was much more fun with paints!
I'm not an expert with a paintbrush. I'm much better with a needle and thread. So I decided to create a simple project that has been on my To Do List for quite a while. I painted pairs of popsicle sticks in 13 colors. Eventually, I'll get around to making "popsicle" covers for each of the sticks out of felt, this way both of my kids have a set of their own. In the meantime, we are using them for coloring matching activities with my almost-two-year-old nephew, math activities with Bean, and shape forming with Munchkin.
I painted one side first and once it was dry, I flipped it over and painted the other side. I used 2 ounce cups to mix the colors in, since my kids were using the palette. In future, I'll definitely be painting on wax paper (but we didn't have any at the time), as the paint stuck to the paper.
The colors are really amazing and bright! You can easily tell them apart. My son has had so much fun stacking, building, and making patterns with them.
Bean loved using them as part of her reading and math lessons.
Addition and subtraction is much more fun with painted popsicle sticks!
Just a handful of popsicle sticks have inspired a ton of fun crafts!
We really liked using them and know we will use them for future painting activities! This weekend we will be taking a nature walk to collect sticks to paint and make a "stick chime" to hang in the backyard. After that we plan to paint more popsicle sticks to make a rainbow bird feeder.
These paints are high-quality and have a smooth buttery texture. They are easy to mix together and dry fairly quickly. We've even had success using them to make a DIY travel watercolor palette!
Disclosure: I received the Acrylic Paint Set for Artists from the Ander Blake Company through Tomoson in exchange for this review. All opinions are my own.
We play board games often, but we always aim to have at least one "Family Game Night" each week. The kids and I mostly play during the day, while Albz is at work. But he enjoys playing with us too, so Family Game Night is important because it means the kids are able to play with him too. Albz and I usually play "big kid" or "adult" games after the kids go to bed, which means they don't always get to see us playing games together and with our friends. We love inviting the neighborhood kids to join in a game or two after they get out of school and they love browsing our collection of games. It makes me a bit sad that they don't have games at home, and if they do it's usually only Monopoly, so it's a fun experience for all of us!
The games we played tonight are new. They just arrived today! And both games were a huge hit with the kids! Bean preferred Bugs in the Kitchen and Munchkin preferred Aargh!
Bugs in the Kitchen is a new family board game from Ravensburger. Ours is straight from Germany and called La Cucaracha, which means The Cockroach in Spanish. It's a super fun game that uses a cockroach HEX Bug nanobot that runs around the kitchen... The game is technically for children 6+, but both of my kids were able to play it using the rules and had no issues.
We will be reviewing Bugs in the Kitchen on the blog soon. But I just wanted to share how much fun the kids had playing it! We literally played for 40 minutes straight!
And now that they know what HEX Bugs are... they need more! We'll be checking them out at Target the next time we go shopping.
The HEX Bug definitely makes this game unique! You basically roll a dice, letting you move a fork, spoon, knife or random utensil. You're working towards getting the HEX Bug into your trap. It's really fun to maneuver the utensils and create paths for the bug to follow.
The second new game we played was AARGH! from Simply Fun. It's a memory game for children 3+, with a fun pirate theme.
You place 25 tiles in 5 by 5 rows. Each player flips tiles and so long as they continue to make a match, they can keep playing. Once they flip a tile that isn't a match, they collect coins for any matches they made and then place the pirate ship on the last tile played. Then all the other tiles are flipped back over.
The game ends when you run out of gold coins. Then each player counts their coins and the player with the most wins.
It's a unique take on a memory game and added lots of new elements that were fun to play with.
And check out our adorable new buddies from The B Hive Creations!! They came out so cute and my kids love them! We are thinking of commissioning an Iron Giant for Munchkin's birthday!
Forest for the Trees from Homeschool Legacy is a Biblically centered Once-A-Week Unit Study. This botanical study of trees and forestry is perfect for children in grades 2-12. Even preschoolers and Kindergartners can use it, depending on how you teach using the materials. You'll learn how to identify trees, create a nature journal and observe botany experiments. You can even use Homeschool Legacy's no-prep unit studies to earn Boy Scout badges! The Forest for the Trees unit study would earn you the Forestry Merit Badge!
Forest for the Trees is a 4 Week Unit Study that comes with everything you need. However, you'll still want to pick up a few library books and take nature walks. We also created a lapbook to go along with our studies. I absolutely loved that this unit study heavily focused on living books and using them to learn more about trees. Living books make up the core of our unit studies. And Homeschool Legacy makes it super easy to find these books at the library by providing the Dewey Decimal identification numbers for all the books they suggest.
Week One focuses on tree identification, which takes you outdoors with a field guide. We walked around our local park, down by the river, and through a small patch of trees near grandma's house to find leaves, bark and seeds to use for tree identification. Some were even added to our lapbook! But most were collected in small baggies and glued to a poster board with the tree name underneath. We also brought our nature journals to the park with us and spent a few minutes drawing trees and leaves, and writing sentences on their observations.
Tree rings.
The tree Bean made for the cover of her lapbook.
The first week has a vocabulary section. We looked up tree words online and then added them to our "Word Tree," which is a big cardboard tree hung up on the wall with velcro spots and removable leaves, which are just laminated green construction paper leaves. We're able to write on them with dry erase markers and it helps us learn words by practicing to read and define them. The words start in a small basket near the base of the tree and the kids can learn one a day or all at once, whichever they prefer. Once they understand the word we add it to the tree. At the end of the week we do a sort of ask out-loud quiz and then we move on to the next set of words. For example, some of the words we used were deciduous, coniferous, tree, leaf, stem, roots, botany, seed, acorn, photosynthesis, gas, tree rings, phloem, xylem, cambium, bark, to name a few. We aim for ten words per week.
We researched local tree information, such as our state tree, what trees grow in our state, what times of year those trees react to the seasons, etc. We drew many trees and plants in our nature journal and we loved all the outdoor activities, like learning to climb a tree! Bean was especially thrilled at the prospect of climbing a tree. Her initial reaction was, "I can do that?" She started with thick trees and quickly found that the bark was too rough on her skin and then moved on to thinned trees with smoother bark. Her favorite tree to climb happened to be the same tree I climbed as a kid at my grandparent's house. We also collected fallen tree branches and leaves to create a sensory bin that we kept at our nature table all month. They added acorns, seeds and bark pieces that they found on their nature walks. We use them for drawing inspiration and to explore textures.
The science activities we attempted were to change the color of celery and white flowers by leaving them in a cup of water with food coloring. We also looked at plant cells under our microscope and drew pictures of the cells. We created a food web focusing on creatures that eat trees and plants and what trees eat using Safari Ltd figures (they have a tree set) and drawing on the poster board things that we didn't have figures of (sunlight, water, soil, etc.).
While this is a Christian curriculum, non-religious families can still use it and either include or exclude those parts of it. We typically just graze through and use what parts we want. We don't usually teach from a religious perspective, but when we are learning about science, I address the issue of how different people view the subject matter. So when it came to those parts of the lessons, I would say something like, "Christians believe that God created trees and plants on the third day of Creation." This way when their cousins or friends talk about Creation, they still know what it is about.
We did not need to take a trip to a local nursery because we have our own little apple garden growing in our window! My kids have been taking care of their small apple trees for a couple weeks now and have loved observing the growth and recording what they learn in their nature journals. Within a few weeks they started to outgrow their container and we will soon be putting them in larger planters. And we actually grew these from seeds we collected from organic apple trees, so it's been a learning experience for the past few months.
We Googled tutorials on growing trees and watched a few videos on YouTube. "How to grow a tree from a seed" and "How to grow a tree from a branch cutting" yielded the best results. The plant in the glass container is actually a plant we grew from a cutting.
During the third week we followed the recipe and made a yummy apple pie! We used fresh apples and were able to pluck out the seeds and used them to explore how seeds grow inside apples and they had first hand experience growing apple trees from seeds.
The longest part of the unit study is the final week, which heavily focuses on the history of trees in america. We watched documentaries and read books about how trees grow and why protecting them is important. We spent a couple days learning about deforestation and how logging can ruin entire ecosystems. During our research we stumbled upon a really neat project to plant new trees using drones.
Overall, we really enjoyed using Forest for the Trees as a month-long unit study. We will absolutely use other Homeschool Legacy unit studies in the future. It was really great how much material they covered and since each week had new books to check out, there were so many opportunities to learn more than just what was in the curriculum. You can also tell that they carefully picked out the best book choices. We were very satisfied with our learning experience.
Forest for the Trees is available for $14 using the Grab-and-Go option or $18.95 for the paperback copy.
Check out the other Unit Studies from Homeschool Legacy!
We received S is for Smiling Sunrise from WordsBright. It's a bright and creative ABC picture book for young children. There are educational sing-along rhymes that focus on values and virtues. When you read it to children of mixed ages, you can also put an emphasis on comprehension and vocabulary words. The overall theme of the book is about being positive!
S is for Smiling Sunrise is suitable for children 3 and up, however toddlers will still enjoy listening to the book being read to them. It has 32 colorful pages and is a hardcover. It's available for $16.95 and can be found online and in bookstores. It can also be used as an early reader.
S is for Smiling Sunrise is not a long book. Each page features a sing-along rhyme, one for each letter. You can read the book all at once (it's really great for circle time!) or you can use for Letter of the Week activities.
We read it all at once the first time and since then we have focused on one letter at a time. We have created crafts and activities to reflect on each letter. Some examples:
A is for Artwork. So we created art by painting pictures and dancing around to cheerful music.
B is for Butterflies. We read some of our books on butterflies, learned about their life cycle, and went on a butterfly scavenger hunt.
C is for Colors. We created a rainbow using perler beads and then hung them in the window to see the light shine through. We also experimented by making rainbows using water, a glass, sunlight and paper.
Another activity we used this book for was to create our own alphabet books. We would read the page, talk about the letter, list off words off the top of our head that start with that letter and then create a little story about that letter and word in our literacy journals.
For example, Munchkin wrote stories primarily about vehicles, robots and monsters. His favorite letter, currently, is I. "I is for Iron Giant. Iron Giant is a big robot who loves to eat metal and is really tall and can fly!" For Bean, the themes were much more varied, as she has many more interests. B is for Bruce Banner. E is for Electricity. I is for Island. J is for Journey. K is for Kinetic Sand. T is for Teleportation. Z is for Zoobs.
There are also pre- and post-reading questions that we addressed for each letter, as part of the parent guide activities. They revolved around Goodness, Beauty and Wonder. We also took the time to come up with some of our own questions, unless no one could think of one. It really made the kids think about each letter and word we were talking about and helped them understand concepts better after talking about them.
We had a lot of fun creating fun activities to go along with this book. It was a perfect addition to our circle time activities, especially because when it arrived, Munchkin had just started to become more interested in letters. S is for Smiling Sunrise is a colorful and inviting book. My kids immediately picked it up and started flipping through the pages. At this point we have read it enough that Bean can read most of the pages on her own. She loves reading it to her brother, although she does sometimes sneak in her own stories while reading.
One major reason why we really enjoyed this book was because it wasn't just another "simple" ABC book. It used beautiful, strong words, that are enriching to a child's understand of words and literacy. It wasn't all A is for Apple, B is for Ball. My kids gave up on those books when they were toddlers and always preferred the book with richer descriptions and interesting words. It was also entertaining to read and got my children singing about their favorite letters. Bean was able to find a word on most pages that she wanted to look up and learn the meaning of.
Visit the WordsBright website to check out the freebies available, including an MP3 download of the alphabet song. They also have a parents guide for Pre-K kids and K-3 kids. Our review copies came with these three included as a CD and printable.
I would suggest this book for any family or classroom with preschool aged children. It's a wonderful book for introducing the alphabet and if you use the teacher/parent guides, you will find more educational uses for the book, including concept examination, questions for conversation starters, vocabulary to learn new words, and activities to create and explore.
Tsuro: The Game of the Path is our Game of the Month! It's a great game for families (especially when young children want to join in), perfect to bring to parties, and is a gateway game to introduce new gamers to the Wonderful World of Board Games!
For today's round, I played with my three-year-old son and five-year-old daughter. They have played Tsuro several times and Bean is basically a rockstar. She wins nearly every game. To be fair though, she has a lot more practice on us, because she plays the beta Tsuro app pretty often.
Tsuro's box is beautiful! It comes with a lovely parchment cover with bamboo art. The rule book folds out. The whole display is gorgeous! You can read through the rules relatively quickly (or you can watch a video review from The Board Game Family or a video review from The Dice Tower) and get the game started in about 20 minutes. If you already know the rules, it takes less than 5 minutes to set up the game and get started.
Tsuro is a game about creating paths using tiles. Each player chooses a dragon stone to represent them. Each stone has a dragon symbol carved into it and there are eight colors to choose from.
The stack of tiles is shuffled and the dealer (parent or adult) hands each player three tiles. Each tile card has a unique pattern on it.
Once you have your tiles, choose a white line on the boarder to start your dragon on their path. (Usually tiles are hidden to the other players, but when I play with the kids, we play face-up.)
We play by letting Munchkin start, with Bean going next and I go last. It's our routine, which makes it easy for the kids to keep track of whose turn it is and we always sit in the same seats, so the order is the same. We use the dragon tile to mark whose turn it is, just in case they forget.
When you play your tile, it aligns with one of the white lines or a path you already created. Every tile has two paths on each side, so there's no wrong way to play your tiles. However, you always have to play a tile that keeps you on the board, unless you have no other choice, and it either sends you into another player or kicks you off the board.
It's a dangerous game when the next tile determines whether you collide, get pushed off the board, or somehow you make it through safely and the game continues.
Which happened! Whenever a dragon travels several tiles, the kids always make "zoom!" sounds.
I was the first to fall off the board. That happens when you run out of available tiles to keep you on the board.
Munchkin was next to fall off.
And technically that meant Bean won, but since this isn't the app that automatically finishes, she continued playing tiles until she fell off the board too. :)
There are enough tiles to fill the entire board, save for one space reserved for the dragon tile.
Tsuro is wonderful and an awesome family game. Kids as young as three can play, with parents or older siblings to help, until they get the hang of it.
Tsuro isn't just a game about the luck of the tiles you draw. It's a game about strategy. And you can even play competitively and try to knock other dragons off the board or just avoid them and take the scenic route.
Tsuro is great for kids and as a gateway game, but if you want to challenge yourself and play a little bit more aggressively, and want to play with dragons that could eat you at any moment, then I would absolutely check out Tsuro of the Seas, and the expansion, Veterans of The Seas for advanced sailors!
from the Ander Blake Company to review. They are a wonderful set that I would highly recommend for any painter, whether you're new or experienced. As a starter set, it was perfect for our family. My children love to paint and we have enjoyed taking these paints outside with a canvas and a picnic blanket.
is our Game of the Month! It's a great game for families (especially when young children want to join in), perfect to bring to parties, and is a gateway game to introduce new gamers to the Wonderful World of Board Games!
, and the expansion, 
for advanced sailors!
, 