Redhanded Homeschool High Fives ~ Our 2017 Crew Favorites

It's time once again, as the Homeschool Review Crew year comes to a close, to choose our Redhanded Homeschool's High Fives for 2017.  I can't believe another year is behind us.  There were about 75 vendor "runs" this year.  My family reviewed 47 products to share with you.  Plus two single reviews for The Old Schoolhouse Magazine.

For the 2017 Homeschool Review Crew Blue Ribbon Awards, voting is very difficult in some categories.  We must choose *just one* vendor or product in each of the Crew's categories.  I've relaxed that rule for my blog.  'Cuz it's my blog, natch!  So where the punks or I loved more than one thing, I'm giving them all High Fives.

As usual, there are old favorites, new treasures, and things I've "had my eye on" for someday.  These favorites are all products that I would, actually have, or might again really pay money for it.  I think it's important that you can trust that when I tell you we absolutely loved something, I really mean it was *that good*.

Malachi's High Five
Carole P. Roman.  We really like her If You Were Me and Lived In... series, but Mal especially enjoyed our first fiction book from Carole, Oh, Susannah: It's in the Bag.  Actually, they all did and we have since read the second book and they're hoping for more.  The reading level is a bit below the older punks, but they love the stories, just for fun.

Xavier's High Five
First, Xav tried to choose Stopmotion Explosion again.  I told him he had to stick to products we reviewed in 2017, so he voted for The Brinkman Adventures - season 4 (see Merrick's High Five below).

Merrick's High Five
The Brinkman Adventures - season 4.  The Crew reviewed season 2 in 2014.  Since then, I've purchased seasons 1 and 3.  These fictionalized versions of real life missionary stories are always a hit.  They have a curriculum out for season 1 that I want to check out at some point, too.

My High Five for Moms
Homeschool Rescue from Only Passionate Curiosity.  I only managed to get through part of the program during the review period.  Now, I'll have a bit more time and I intend to finish it through once.  Then I want to work through it once each year to update our homeschool plan.
SchoolhouseTeachers.com is way more than just classes for the kids, though it certainly is that.  We've used this off and on since, I think 2011, when it started.  Back in those "olden days" if you had a subscription to the print Old Schoolhouse Magazine, you were given SchoolhouseTeachers.com access until your subscription ran out.  I had over a year of it.  About a year after it expired, I won another year in 2013.  In 2014, 2016, and 2017 I received access as a reviewer for the Homeschool Review Crew.  Hey, we're all family.  :)  I have decided to not return to the Crew in 2018 for various reasons, so I purchased two years during the BOGO sale last week.

These curriculum favorites are products we are still using, have completed this year, or will continue to use in 2018 and beyond.

Language Arts High Fives
Crafty Classroom's Learn to R.E.A.D. program - Merrick loves having his own school stuff that no one else does and the notebooking pages are so much fun for a Kinder.
Channie's Handwriting and Math Workbooks - I only reviewed the one handwriting workbook for littles, but I liked it so much, I ordered handwriting journals for the bigger littles and several math workbooks.
Reading Eggs - We've had Reading Eggs before.  I liked it so much, I was willing to pay for it when the bigger punks were littler.  Now Mal and Merrick are happily using it.  Merrick also likes to dabble in MathSeeds, though it placed him lower than I thought he should be.  I consider MathSeeds "just for fun" school.

Math High Fives
CTCMath.  Always.  And it's now a complete math curriculum for grades K-12. Another curriculum I have happily paid for and will again.

Science High Fives
Think Like an Engineer from Innovators Tribe is so much fun with all the hands on challenges.  I love that we are encouraged to include the whole family in this subscription.

Social Studies High Fives
Drive Thru History - The Gospels.  The Drive Thru History series is fantastic.  We're also using the American History videos for part of Xav and Mal's history this year.
Heirloom Audio ~ In the Reign of Terror and Captain Bayley's Heir.  While I have reviewed other Heirloom Audio titles for the Crew, I have also purchased copies of other titles in the series.  These audio dramas are crazy good.

Extra-Curricular High Fives
Creating a Masterpiece.  I wish we had been able to fit more of Sharon's lessons in before our subscription expired, but we really enjoyed learning how to make real art while we had it.
Doctor Aviation with Daryl Smith.  This one expires pretty soon and we enjoyed it a lot, though we didn't get through as much as we would have liked.

My Bonus High Fives
Lamplighter's The Secret Bridge.  While this wasn't the best book I ever read, I enjoyed it and it opened up a whole new world of literature for us.  Since this review, we toured the Lamplighter Ministries Book Bindery and purchased five or six more books and three audio dramas.  I especially recommend Sir Malcom and the Missing Prince and Teddy's Button.
Northern Speech Services' Color My Conversation was one of those "didn't know I needed" kind of curriculum.  We did set this aside, but will be picking it back up and starting over after the holidays.


Check out the *Official* Homeschool Review Crew Blue Ribbon Award winners and look in the Linky to read about my Crew Mates' family favorites.

Thin Stix ~ A Homeschool Crew Review

The Pencil Grip, Inc. has been a favorite vendor of this family since we reviewed their original Kwik Stix last year.  In fact, I gave them a Redhanded Homeschool High Five, we had that much fun with them!  After that review, I purchased a pack of the Kwik Stix Metalix.  Those are especially fun because they give projects a bit of sparkle.  Today, I'm going to tell you about Thin Stix 6pk of Classic Colors.

Thin Stix, and their brother Kwik Stix, are non-toxic tempera paint sticks that look and work exactly like a glue stick.  You pop off the cap, twist the stix up to use it and twist it back down and cap it to store it.  The Thin Stix also have a clip, like a pen does, on the cap.  Thin Stix come in both a six pack and a 12 pack, metalix and neon six packs, and a pack of 24 which includes the colors from a 12 pack plus the metalix and neon.  The six pack of classic colors contains red, yellow, green, blue, black, and brown.

The Thin Stix arrived right before we headed to Tae Kwon Do one day, so I brought them in with me to look over.  Luckily, they came with a flyer in the box, because Merrick wanted to get started right away.  It was the only paper I had with me, surprisingly.  He was busy all through TKD and even finished up when we got home.  Kid art supplies that don't make a mess and are easy to carry around with us is a real bonus on the days we are in the car a lot.

 

We made some signage for our trip to the Cog Railway in NH earlier this week.  The Thin Stix were nice for writing and making more detailed drawings than we are used to with the Kwik Stix.  I make signs with them all the time.  Like when we had to replace one of the signs we hold when we cheer for Dad at a race.  I write them, the boys decorate them, and then they get laminated so rain and dirty paws don't ruin them.

I picked up this cool bin a few weeks ago, and as plans for our trip to the Cog Railway progressed, I threw in our original Kwik Stix, the Kwik Stix Metalix, and the new Thin Stix.  Then I added a decent pad of heavyweight art paper.  I think the medium weight would have been fine since the stix are mess free.  The lid acted as a writing desk and everything was neatly contained.  Well, until someone dumped the whole tray in the back and by the time I found out about it, they had rolled all over the back two rows of the van.

The bin also came in handy while we were preparing to leave the hotel.  Some of the boys' buddies dropped in and I kept them busy painting with our stash.

You can see some of the other ways we thoroughly tested out Kwik Stix original, too.  We used cardboard, dark and light construction paper, wood, and canvas fabric.  This time, I tried my hand at an art canvas.  It's sort of Starry Night-like.  It was fun to try this new (to me) art technique with the various Stix.  I did use Kwik Stix (for orange and white) and a couple of Metalix, too.  I'm probably going to have to invest in a 12 pack of Thin Stix since we really did miss the orange and white in several projects.

The Stix do take longer than 90 seconds to dry, but I'd say only 2 to 4 minutes, depending on coverage.  We seem to lay it on pretty thick.  It's still way faster and neater than actual tempera paints.  If you let the paint dry thoroughly, there is no problem at all with layering colors without mixing them or getting them on each other. 

The Pencil Grip, Inc. also sells school and office supplies, the best pencil grips (we love them here!), and cool fidgets that I plan on ordering soon, too.  They look really fun and I think will help my wiggly boys.  There's a page of free informational PDFs about the Pencil Grip on their website.




Thin Stix, Kwik Stix, Metalix, and neons are available at retailers like Amazon and Toys R Us.


Find The Pencil Grip, Inc. on social media.

• Facebook      
• Twitter     
• Pinterest           

Creating a Masterpiece ~ A Homeschool Crew Review

The boys are little interested in art (or crafts, for that matter) that doesn't involve trains.  Or mine cars.  Or Minecraft.  They're not really interested in much of anything that doesn't involve trains, actually.  Because of that, I was tempted to ask not to be placed on this review for the Monthly Plan.  I really wanted to give Creating a Masterpiece a legitimate try first though.  I'm so glad we did!  There is a sample lesson in soft pastel that you can try for free. 

We dug out our cheap pastels and some black construction paper and got to work.  I did pass out rubber gloves, because I have two kids I think would not have liked smearing the chalk around while their fingers got messier and messier.  When I think about it, it's almost hilarious because they *are* messy boys in all the other ways!

I was really pleased with how the projects came out.  Everyone worked to their abilities and seemed to be enjoying the lesson.  Mal was a little upset by the end because he didn't feel it was "as good" as the instructor's or mine.  We worked through all three sessions to complete it at once and he really needed it broken down a bit more.  That was entirely my fault.  Since we mostly enjoyed that *fantastic* project, I really wanted to be on this review.

If you sign up for the free lesson, you can access a supply list for all of the masterpiece projects.  I purchased two kinds of nice paper in black and in white, chalk pastels, pens, and a few other things.  It felt a little pricey, but I can use many of the items I picked up for a ton of projects.  We did have some decent supplies already, like my good colored pencils.  I also have some oil paints, but I haven't ventured into that realm yet.  (Scary.)

The online art program videos are taught by Sharon Hofer who also has a fine art school.  She teaches all the techniques required to complete a lesson, offers tips on supplies to purchase, and walks you step by step through each lesson.  The best part about the videos, is that you can easily pause at any time so each child (or mom) can catch up without feeling rushed.  Once you learn the techniques, they can be used to create other projects of your own choosing.  Instructions are very clear and Sharon is a very pleasant person to watch.

While there are 3D art lessons in balsa carving, glass mosaic, and sculpture, we stuck with two dimensional art during the review period.  Our projects included soft pastels, colored pencil, and ink.  I do not have an artistic bone in my body, but I found the lessons we completed to be fun, (mostly) stress-free, and relatively easy.  The finished masterpieces look so nice.  Each of the punks put their own twist on the assignments.  I think they enjoyed the colored pencil: tropical clown fish lesson best.  That one seemed to be the easiest one to adapt a bit.  They added tiny fish in the background and things on the sea floor.

I'm a paper crafter myself, and as I was working on the lesson in ink: dragonfly, I was thinking about how much fun it would be to have the punks make small versions of art to place on card fronts.  In fact, a wintry scene would be just right for a Christmas card.  There happens to be a beginner level lesson in oil pastel: winter cabin that would look lovely.  Stipple would *not* be the technique I would use for that!  Well, maybe with sharpies, but certainly not with the micron pen I used.  But wouldn't that be an amazingly sweet card to receive?

I really liked that these projects are *masterpieces* and not the usual arts and crafts type lessons younger children would be making.  We still do plenty of those, two of my kids cannot be kept away from any scrap of construction paper and kid's version of art supplies.  There is a marked difference between the quality of those projects that isn't explained just by the supplies.  They really put forth an effort with the good supplies and the guidance of Sharon.

Here are our projects.

Colored Pencil Tropical Clown Fish - level 1
For this, I used my Faber-Castell pencils.  These worked very nicely for the layering and blending this artwork required.  Mal and Xav used Crayola *erasable* pencils which they love, but they weren't really suitable in this instance.  Merrick started with crayon and I didn't bother arguing with him.  Once he realized they didn't work the same as the pencils, he switched to some old Pedigree pencils I had.  Any regular colored pencils you have should work fine.  I learned that I can not put the paper on the table cloth because it left lines in my work.

Ink Dragonfly - level 2
I bought the micron pens recommended in the lesson.  I also grabbed a pack of colored micron pens.  I completed this project alone, but after watching the video, I think the boys might be able to do a decent job of it with a Sharpie.  Stippling takes a long time with a micron pen!  :)  As I worked through the dragonfly with the black pen, I was wondering about adding colors to the picture.  I told my husband I wanted to add some blue and green, but was afraid to ruin the whole thing.  (See?  I have no artistic talent at all.)  At the end of the video lesson, Sharon did say it was fine to do that.  I added some highlights, but I had so many dots in that dragonfly, I don't really think you can see them.  I learned that it's OK to try any of the ideas that come to mind because it might even be mentioned as an option at the end of the video.

Ink Peacock Feathers - beginner
While this lesson was also in ink, it called for India ink, the kind you would use in a fountain pen.  When I was deciding which projects to showcase in our review and making a list of supplies to order, I did not plan to do this one at this time.  I actually bought a bunch of nice pastels, because we enjoyed the sample lesson so much.  I wanted to feature different mediums and techniques, so I chose this one because it was so pretty.  I thought about the Tombow pen that was needed for this project and realized I own some Tombow from my paper crafting past life.  That reminded me that I had stamp pad refills (aka ink!) in my craft room as well.  So that's exactly what I used.  I love how it came out.  I learned that sometimes you have exactly what you need in your stash!



Lessons come in six levels, beginner and 1-5.  Each level includes similar media, but with progressively more challenging projects.  Some of the techniques are:

• chalk pastels
• oil pastels
• ink
• colored pencil
• watercolor
• sculpture
• acrylics
• pencil
• silk dying
• gouache
• charcoal
• alcohol ink
• and glass mosaic.

More advanced lessons are available in copper tooling, batik, portraiture, and wood burning.  Sharon also offers an Art in History program that looks terrific.  There are currently four lessons in that section, with more on the way.  You can read a bit about it on the Projects page.  Just choose the Art in History tab.

There are three membership options for families.  There is a monthly plan and a yearly plan with access to all of the lessons on the Creating a Masterpiece website and one year access to all of the projects in an individual level.  They also offer group rates for multiple licenses.  I know art lessons can be expensive, but just as an example Level 2 currently consists of nine projects (31 lessons of various lengths).  For $169 you could access them for a full year.  Our co-op offers real art lessons and students pay nearly that amount for 15-17 classes (every other week).

Find Creating a Masterpiece on social media.
Facebook 


You might really enjoy seeing what the rest of the Homeschool Review Crew did with their families by clicking the banner below.

Best of the Best ~ 2016 Crew Awards

After taking 2015 off from The Crew, we happily rejoined this year.  It has been a whirlwind of amazing homeschool products.  Many were return vendors we know and love and there were lots of fresh, new companies joining us, too.  Some curricula were on my "short list" for "some day" and some were wonderful surprises.  We used and reviewed just over forty products for The Homeschool Review Crew, plus some single reviews for The Old Schoolhouse Magazine, which you'll also, eventually, get to read about here.

Last week, The Crew reviewers and their kiddos were all invited to vote for our favorite reviews of the 2016 run.  I have to say, this is probably one of the absolute hardest parts of being on The Crew.  You get to vote for *just one* thing in each category. It's incredibly difficult, sometimes, to narrow it down.


My personal *blog* requirements are a bit more lenient in that I allow us to choose several items in categories I want to use.  To simplify, I used subjects for the categories or I could go on and list nearly every review we did here. So, here goes.  Here are Redhanded Homeschool's High Fives for the 2016 Homeschool Review Crew.  All links will take you to my original reviews.

Malachi's High Five
Familyman Ministries' The Familyman's Christmas Treasury
We all like these stories so much.  Almost every time we get in the car, they ask me to play Cootie McKay, Captain Chaos, or The Stranger.

Xavier's High Five ("Obviously.")
Stopmotion Explosion's Stopmotion Animation Kit
We've all liked this and have made it a bit of a hobby.  I'm even teaching the kids at co-op a class based on the information I learned from SME and other kits, and videos we've been using.

Merrick's High Five
Talking Fingers, Inc.'s Read, Write, & Type
Who doesn't like teaching pesky Vexor a lesson for bad behavior?  And there's the bonus of learning to read, write, and type as you go.

My High Fives for Moms
MyFreezEasy
Love, love, love this one!  I've tried freezer cooking before, but it was always overwhelming to me.  Not anymore!

SchoolhouseTeachers.com
While on the surface, SchoolhouseTeachers.com is for classes, there are also tons of resources for moms and the whole family.

Most of the following products are favorites that we have finished, kept using through the year, or will be using in the future.

Language Arts
LOE Foundations A 
Merrick used several reading and writing programs this year and he (and BooBear, his teddy) really enjoyed this one.

IEW's Linguistic Development Through Poetry Memorization
"Ooey gooey was a worm..."  We all had a blast studying and memorizing poetry this year.  This program will be with us for years to come.

Progeny Press' The Sword in the Tree e-guide
This was a really good study based on a book that really held their attention.

Can Do Cubes from jollyliteracy.com
While Merrick liked using these with Jolly Phonics, the beauty of these cubes is that they can be used with any program.  All of my kids like manipulatives.  Why not have them in LA also?

Language Arts ~ Honorable Mention 
I have one honorable mention again this year.  This is a *great* writing program, but we just weren't able to finish it for various reasons.  I almost held a co-op class in my home using Here to Help Learning, but we had a bunch of balls in the air at that time and I couldn't figure out a good time to do it.  I'd be so happy to use it again sometime, though. 

Math
CTCMath
I love this math times 1000!  Malachi especially does well with it.  He worked tirelessly this summer to get his scores up in multiplication, working the section over and over.  I was so proud of him, but more importantly, he was proud of his own achievements.  We use CTCMath almost every day.

Math ~ Honorable Mention
It's a game.  It's math.  It's Sunya the Magic and Wonder of Math and Science Adding & Subtracting.  This is a fun card game (with a really long name) for memorizing math facts and comes in multiplication and division as well.  We should use it more often.  And get Merrick playing it with us.

Science
Apologia's Exploring Creation with Astronomy 2nd edition
We had a great time using this edition with Merrick (and Xav who can't get enough science).  I'd used the first edition with Mal and Xav years ago.  We have loved each Apologia science we've used.

Social Studies 
Heirloom Audio 
We love every. single. one. of Heirloom Audio's Henty titles we've heard.  Most we received through The Crew, but we've also listened to a few I purchased.  I love the downloads that come with the CDs including the study guide which turns the stories into a nice historical unit.

Extra-Curricular  
Zeezok Publishing's Music Appreciation 
Not only is this an AMAZING music appreciation curriculum, it also has a lot of historical information in it as well as a focus on positive character traits.

Memoria Press' Traditional Logic hurt my brain.  I obviously don't have a high schooler, so I worked on this course my own self.  It's a great program.

Foreign Languages for Kids by Kids Spanish Starter Set
This was such a fun video Spanish class.  The boys love that it takes place on a day in the life of three brothers.

Middlebury Interactive Languages Elementary Chinese 1
This is the third course we've used from Middlebury and our first foray into Chinese.  It's a great program and I liked that it also taught some characters and had special paper to download for writing practice. 

Just For Fun  
The Pencil Grip's Kwik Stix 
We bigfatpuffyheart Kwik Stix tempera paint.  They were easy to use and worked great on paper, cardboard, wood, and canvas.

Enlivenze FlipStir
Enclosed puzzles with no loose pieces.  What's not to love?  They're fun and challenging.

Special Category - Best Gift
CrossTimber Name Meaning Gifts
I had to include CrossTimber, but it isn't curriculum or a puzzle, so...  New category invented.  Check.  Hey, it's my blog and these are my favorites.  I'm not sure if the best part about CrossTimber is that they can make something meaningful for *any* name, or seeing how happy you can make someone with one of their Name Meaning Gifts.

You can see how the official voting of The Homeschool Review Crew went on the blog.

The Pencil Grip, Inc. TOS Review

I knew when I first heard about Kwik Stix from The Pencil Grip, Inc., there were going to be a couple of happy boys at our house.  I didn't realize there would also be a happy mom!  The Kwik Stix 12 pk arrived while Grandma and Poppa were visiting.  They always bring projects to build and toys to play with when they're here.  This time, it was a set of wooden castles and catapults that needed to be painted before they could be played with.  The boys (and grandma) were already painting with the paint pots that came with the castles when the Kwik Stix were delivered.  The table was covered with brown paper, Merrick was wearing an apron, the cups of water and paper towels were out.  You know the drill.

The toughest part about painting like that for the boys is w a i t i n g.  Waiting for the paint to dry between colors when they wanted to paint details.  Waiting for it to dry to play with.  Sometimes being patient is difficult.  We were able to finish up the castles in minutes, compared to a couple of hours.  In no time at all, everything was painted and dried.

At first, we used the acrylic paint in pots, but once the Kwik Stix arrived, we were able to get rid of all of the brown paper, aprons, and paper towels.  The black castle on the left was painted with Kwik Stix.

Kwik Stix look like a glue stick.  You simply remove the cap and twist the tempera paint stick out of the tube.  Apply the paint and twist it right back into the tube.  Recap.  No-mess art and almost zero clean up.  Easy like Sunday morning.  Pause here to sing it.  Feel the mellow.  I'll wait.  The colors are incredibly bright and give great coverage.  The Kwik Stix 12 pk contains red, orange, yellow, two shades of green, two shades of blue, purple, pink, white, brown, and black.  Besides the 12 pack, Kwik Stix comes in a six pack of neons or metallix paints, as well as a basic six pack or a whopping 96-count classroom pack which is eight of each color from the 12 pack.  I did think with thorough coverage, it took two to three minutes to dry completely.  Even though I didn't see 90 second dry time, it was still very reasonable and much faster than regular paints.

Merrick, Xavier, and I have painted on tons of paper, in lots of colors.  We've even layered colors. Merrick has become somewhat notorious for choosing dark colors of construction paper and covering large portions of them with black Kwik Stix.  We thoroughly tested light paint on dark paper, dark on light, layering paints on each other.  When we let the first color dry, there was no problem layering colors without mixing them.

I used Kwik Stix on the cardboard tri-fold when we made our Alan Shepard display corner.  (I wish there had been a gray Kwik Stix for the moon topography.)  Also, I may have finished up *all* of the black stick (which we used in many projects before the tri-fold) by the end of the display board, so the coverage wasn't as thick as I had intended to get it.

Malachi isn't a huge artsy kid.  He just isn't that interested.  He had a big, canvas hoop tent that I picked up at Joann's for 75% off just before Christmas.  (SCORE!)  The kit was intended to be tie-dyed, but when I talked with Mal about how we wanted to decorate it and which colors we would dye it, he was adamant that it should be decorated with trains.  The tent sat in the box for a couple of months while I thought about the best way to decorate canvas.  After the Kwik Stix arrived, Mal decided to use them to paint the train scene from Back to the Future 3 on his tent.  He even ended up drawing a little Doc and Clara hanging off the side of the engine by the time he was done.

At co-op, there hasn't been any chance to paint in Mrs. Blake's art class.  Her class was (I say *was* because last week was the last class of the year!) the last period of the day, so there was no way paint would dry before it was time to leave.  No way paint would dry before Kwik Stix!  I took the pack in for our group one day.  I laid down a few ground rules about not twisting out the entire stick of tempera paint and giving the paint a couple minutes to dry before layering the colors.  The group is about ages 3-7.  They all did a terrific job following instructions and were pretty creative.  Some of them painted the clothespin airplanes we made and some made pictures on construction paper.

When the Kwik Stix arrived, I was also surprised to receive a Pencil Grip in the box.  We actually have a bit of experience with various pencil grips in this house.  Mal has had a time of learning to properly hold a pen or pencil for writing and we've used our fair share of tricks and techniques to help him with that.  The Pencil Grip is a nice, somewhat squishier grip that is suitable for left or right handed people.  The letters R and L mark the section where the user's thumb rests.  The Pencil Grip is recommended by PTs and OTs, and it's definitely the best one we've tried.

There's a page of free informational PDFs about the Pencil Grip on their website.

Find The Pencil Grip on social media.
Website  
Facebook 
Pinterest
Twitter 

Be sure to click on the banner to see more art projects from the Crew!