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.

Innovators Tribe ~ A Homeschool Crew Review

When Innovators Tribe showed up in the upcoming vendor list for the Crew, I sent Dad the link and asked if he thought Xav would be able to use the course in any meaningful way.  Xav's my STEM guy.  Well, minus the "M" - math.  He loves experiments and hands on work.  Thinking Like an Engineer looked like something right up his alley.  Dad said he thought Xav could do it, but he knew he would definitely LOVE the course.  Wayne Kroeplin's (Mr. K) courses are for grades 6-12 with some wiggle room.  My punks are in 5th and 6th grade, but math is a struggle.  *So far* math hasn't been an issue at all.  They haven't needed it for anything.  Not even to succeed in the challenges.  The best part about this class is that you are *encouraged* to invite everyone in the family to participate *together*.  This has given us some fun memories of supporting and working alongside each other.  (And believe me, those moments are few and far between.  We seem to be in a very competitive stage.)

Thinking Like an Engineer is a pre-recorded online course.  Pacing is decided by you and your family.  We took a pretty leisurely pace and generally watched one lesson or completed one challenge each week.  Certainly, your students could work at a faster pace.  I think a video/slide show lesson plus a challenge (or more!) in the same week is completely doable.  At one lesson and one challenge, you would spend about 2-3 hours on the course for the week.

Each unit has a "journal" to fill in with the information found in the videos, sort of a guided notetaking page.  The lessons also have assignments.  We've had various amounts of success with the journals and assignments.  One assignment is learning about an engineer that is involved *somewhere* with a topic in which the students are interested.  Well, Mal is only interested one kind of "engineer" and that's a *train* engineer.  I have directed him to transportation engineers and we've looked up how engineering is used in the design of trains and railways.  It isn't quite the same, but he was willing to learn a bit about it.  Xav was interested in engineering as it applies to Lego toys.  While we found listings for job openings in engineering for Lego, they were in a foreign language.  Most of what we found was about designing Lego sets.  So, the researching engineers part didn't go great for us, it was good practice at online researching and we did learn a bit.


The units include:

• Intro to Engineering
• Intro to 3D Design
• Engineering Rollercoasters
• Engineering Bridges
• Nano Engineering
• Thinking Like an Engineer - Course Conclusion

I thought I'd tell you about some of our favorite activities and challenges to give you a feel for the course.  Lesson 3 is called Engineering Clean Water.  While I watched the lesson and the associated outside videos, I remembered the PlayPump.  Does anyone else recall the water pump that was run by children playing on a Merry-Go-Round?  I always thought that was genius.  Unfortunately, when I looked it up recently, I found out it didn't end very well, for the most part.  Throughout the Thinking Like an Engineer course, we were encouraged to be innovators and try new things.  Even though the PlayPump doesn't work well in all situations, it was definitely innovative.

In lesson 4, you receive the 3D Design software that you will use to create bridges and roller coasters.  We aren't using this yet (so close), but I know Xav especially is going to love it.  He eats that kind of thing right up!

The challenges have been a blast!  Some times we don't handle failure very well, When we have worked on the challenges, there has been an "Oh, rats!" or three, but no one has been angry about starting over and rethinking the processes.  We have had so much fun completing these tasks together.

Our first hands on challenge was to try to construct towers using regular copy paper.  Well, the punks were a bit disappointed, because Mr. K said some students had built their towers a couple feet taller than they did.

His class also stacked more books than we did in the second challenge.  We used one sheet of paper and had two feet of masking tape for this challenge.  We tried fan folding, circles, and concentric circles.

This happened a lot.

 And this.

But through all the challenges we faced, we brainstormed our way through to make the best of the assignment and to figure out what we could do differently or better to improve our results.  Eventually, we got to this.

If I had made just three or maybe four rings, even though they were super tiny, I would have had more stability and been able to stack books higher.

Our third challenge was creating a crude water filter using information from an Environmental Protection Agency video.  We didn't complete that challenge here at home, because a class in our co-op recently did this.  (Hmmm... As co-op yearbook creator, I thought I had taken a picture of that lesson, but it appears I did not.) 

The one thing I really wished for was the "solution" to the challenges.  How did Mr. K's class get 200 POUNDS of books on the single sheet of paper?  HOW?  I need to know!  Maybe gEEk Dad can tell me.  The punks and I absolutely love the hands on quality of the coursework and they really like the videos.  They've learned a lot of information seemingly unrelated to engineering.  I think they especially liked the clean water challenge and we could tell that it was an important problem to Mr. K.

I also enrolled in the free Think Like an Innovator course.  I think the punks are going to like it, too!  Mr. K offers another course, Thinking Like an Architect, also for grades 6-12.  Some of my CrewMates reviewed that as well.  So please click below to read some of the other reviews.

Crazy Contraptions Co-op Class (I promise, no more intentional alliteration.)

Dad taught a class this past year at our co-op called Crazy Contraptions.  How our co-op works is that right after we finish the school year, each family completes an end of year survey.  One of the sections on the form asks what the students would be interested in learning about and what classes the parents would be interested in teaching the following year.  Those suggestions are turned into a prospective class list and sent back out to families for a first round of voting, each child choosing up to five courses.  That's the step we are at right now.  Soon, we'll get the second round and will probably have to choose a top three.  I do admit, there has been a time or two I've pretended I couldn't count and selected four classes for a kid.  That usually happens when one of the older punks really wants to choose a class, I'd rather they not take.  I include their list and my preference with an explanation.

Anyhoo, an unsuspecting parent is sometimes asked to teach an instructorless class.  Enter, Micah.  LOL  In the end, the students in the class ended up being younger than anticipated (he had ten boys twelve and younger), so the projects became a bit easier after the first one.  Here are some of the Crazy Contraptions the boys ended up making.

A walking robot thingy.

A do nothing box thingy.

A working catapult.

Rube Goldberg machines.

Paper and duct tape rockets.

Hovercraft.

They also made the rattlesnake egg pranks (remember those?).  The boys were so excited the next time we met to tell us all about who they frightened.  And Micah took in a Jacob's ladder he made.

Mrs. A and I helped with class almost every week.  We also invited Mrs. M, Mrs. P, Mr. R, and Mr. C to help out once or thrice (the punks are loving that word lately).   Co-op is a great example of gaining knowledge for our kiddos from people outside of our home (though, in this case, it was Dad).

What are some ways you share your talents with others or borrow from other adults and older kiddos for your children?

gEEk School ~ Marshmallow Shooter

Xav was gifted with this terrifically fun marshmallow shooter.  It was a snap to assemble and is a huge hit.  Xav and Merrick particularly enjoyed it and their laughter was contagious.

You need just five pieces of PVC pipe.

• Two inch
• Five inch
• Seven inch
• Two 90* elbows

Add in some marshmallows and a target.  We also found that the small craft pompoms worked OK, too.

I'm sorry, I don't know where this particular target came from, but you can use or make any target.  Three dimensional targets are fun, too.  Set up paper towel and toilet paper tubes and knock them over with your marshmallow projectiles.

Super easy assembly, as shown above.  Pop the marshmallow in the end of the 5" piece, which is also the end you blow in.  I'd guess the elbow joints tend to slow your projectile down a bit.  With the boys in this house, slowing them down is definitely a plus!

It wouldn't be a great project in this house unless some alterations were made to the design.  "Just this once." 

THMJ Weeks of 2/23/14 and 3/2/14

    In my life this week…
2/23  Merrick is happy in his new pullups.  He hugged them and kissed them because they have Cars on them.  He has peed in the potty several times a day for five days now.

3/2  He still uses the potty, usually 1-3 times/day, but he isn't keen on going often.  Sometimes, we may use tricks to get him in there.  *innocents*


    In our homeschool this week… 
I did the Oreo full moon thingy with the boys this week.  Fun, educational, and tasty.

*please hold for rassnfrassn no good photographs to somehow get their stinky acts together and upload correctly*

The boys had their first session of gEEk school with Dad.

    In our homeschool co-op this week... 
2/23  Magic School Bus Science: We erupted a volcano.  Not as wow as I was hoping for.  The instructions called for water.  I really don't think the water helped us.  We also made earth layers and put houses, people, and animals (including some dinosaurs!) around the surface.
Duct tape: Mal made a cootie catcher.  Ah, memories.
Amazing Body: The class is finishing up their bodies.  Next class should finish them up and we'll be bringing a lovely skeleton with his innards back home. 
Nature: Xav learned about wings, looked at and drew feathers.
Crafts: Xav made a heart mobile.
Merrick attended Wiggles and Giggles.
We had our Valentine lunch party since school was canceled last time.

    In Rangers this week...
Q verse: Be Quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger.  James 1:19
R verse: Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.  Exodus 20:8

    What we're reading... 
Read Aloud
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
Reading on their own
Phineas and Ferb: How to Conquer the Tri-State Area
The Egg-cellent Easter Adventure

For myself
IndoctriNation (It takes me forever to read a book for myself.  I don't get to it often.)

    Around the house... 
Merrick has figured out how to get in *and* out of the crib.  That will be the end of that soon.

He put himself to bed after a tantrum.

      My kiddos favorite thing this week was…
I think Xav's favorite was building this model with his dad one evening.

They ALL loved the all-out, insane Nerf Wars that have started in this house.

Xav lying in wait for Dad.

    Things Dad is working on...
gEEk school!

 

    I’m cooking…
I didn't cook it, but I mixed up some local chevre with salsa for our (delayed) co-op Valentine party.  Super yummy with tortilla chips.

    Out of the mouths of boys... 
Micah was puttering in the basement.
Xav:  I'm worried about Dad.  He's working on the Sabbath.
(Never mind that Mom was tidying the living room at that exact moment.)

Merrick in a bin.  What a goof.

    A photo, video, link, or quote to share (silly, serious or both!)…
Hilarious quiz.  Which preformed concrete product are you? (A bit of satire in response to all those, "Which character are you?" quizzes going around.)

 "You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance." F P Jones

I'll be linking up at:
Holy Splendor
Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers
The Homeschool Mother's Journal