 Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Waldeck Way. I'm Jessica. Today's video is going to be a brand new, easy, peasy, low stress, homeschool resource perfect for child and interest-led learning. One of the roles that we made very early on in our homeschool to cultivate that child-led and interest-led learning was to never let a question go unanswered. Now, that doesn't mean that Kevin and I had all the answers. It just meant we never let it go unanswered. So we would Google it, watch a video on it, find a book on it, ask our daughter, you know, all of these things, and we may not even be able to find the answer right then, but we were very, very proactive about saying, you know, we don't know. Let's look that up when we get home or we don't know. Let's research that. Let's find a book on it the next time we go to the library, etc. That has been probably the number one thing that has led to the most success in our homeschool when it comes to interest and child-led learning. And I feel like my personal favorite thing that has come from that is all of the glorious rabbit trails that we've gone down. Like I can't tell you how many times like something has happened and it's just gone on and on and on for an example a few years ago. Our trash got knocked over by some dogs. There were vultures in the yard. Emily had a question about vultures and somehow we ended up like down this whole vulture rabbit trail learning more than I ever cared to learn about them, but it was also kind of fun and she is now still years later mildly obsessed with them. Like she probably knows more than any person should know about a vulture, but it was very, very fun. And that's one of my favorite things about child-led and interest-led learning is because when those sparks light, when that happens, when you, when you go down those trails, the things that they learn stick with them for so much longer than anything that I could have ever planned for us to have done. Like that vulture lesson is something that even four or five years later she has not forgotten any piece or part of, but if I had just randomly said, Hey, let's learn about vultures today and planned this whole lesson, learning probably even some of the same things, I bet it would not have stuck with her. I could, I could almost guarantee you she would not remember the amount that she remembers today. And so because of that, I really was kind of looking for a resource now that Emily is older that would allow her to still kind of capture that I have a question, I need an answer. And if I find the question, the answer to that question, maybe I could go down a rabbit trail with it. But I wanted to give her a little bit more independence with that because she is older because she's in middle school now. And so I looked for a lot of different resources. We've been using a book in our morning time that's like a question a day for curious kids. It's interesting, but the answers that they give you are, you know, a little short, like a couple sentences. And I have found that most of the time she's like, Yeah, I know that like it's it's not we are not going down those rabbit trails I wanted to see us going down. And one of her main like favorite ways to learn is with video. She's auditory, but also visual. And so YouTube videos have always been a really great sweet spot for us. So I thought, well, man, if I could find a way to incorporate that, it would be perfect to be like the perfect jumping off source. So I looked for different things. I could not find the resource that I wanted. So I created it. And so far I have created six different bundles of them. They are discovery decks. Now we will look into these a little bit further later. And each discovery deck is topic based. So we have all about animals, all about space, all things weather, the human body, interesting inventions and how it's made. So those are the six topics that we have. And within each topic, I have 20 different cards. Each card has a question along with a QR code and the QR codes link to a YouTube video that answers that question in less than 10 minutes. 5 to 10 was kind of my goal. So far these have been a huge hit in our homeschool. We have been using them currently as kind of like the start of our day. And then we kind of have been basing our book in a game around them. If you want to hear more about that and what we're doing to ease back into the new year, you can watch last week's video, which is right here. But they've been a huge hit. Emily loves them. She loves the QR codes and scanning them. She's always loved that. She loves the YouTube videos. She is devouring the all about animals one because she's always been obsessed with animals. And some of them are hilarious. Like she's been watching these in the mornings and then she regurgitates all of it to me. And sometimes we go down rabbit trails. Sometimes she's learned enough and she doesn't need to learn anymore. Either way, they've been such a perfect sweet spot in our homeschool. What I love about this is that it is simple. It took me approximately 15 minutes to print them and cut them. That's it. That's all I had to do. After they were print and cut, they were ready for her to scan and learn. Like it was so simple. Anybody can do it. The videos are appropriate for almost all ages. I mean, I don't think there's anything that's inappropriate unless you don't want your kids to know about broken bones or something like that for the little, little ones. There's nothing that's, you know, not appropriate for larger kids or older kids. They're great for all ages. Your kids can learn them together and there's so many uses for them. So you can do them like I'm using them, which is screwing. I mean, I just literally take a card and leave it on our dining room table and she scans it and watches that video with breakfast in the morning. You could do that with your kids. You could screw it for lunch. You could, you know, whatever time of day you need 10 to 15 minutes to yourself. Maybe it's when you're cooking dinner. Maybe you're like, Hey, I'm going to go quick dinner here, scan and watch this. Maybe it's for car schooling. Maybe you want your kids to do something educational in the car, but they don't like to read or listen to audiobooks. But you could say, Hey, you know, you want your tablet in the car or whatever, but let's watch this video first and you hand in the card, they scan it, they watch it, and then maybe they can have free time after that. I am not beyond some educational incentive to get screen time. So that is totally in the wheelhouse of things I would do. I think they would also make a great addition to a morning time you could easily have. I mean, currently with six decks out, that means that there's over 100 cards. So that would easily be almost the whole school year. You could, you know, pick a card at random every day, scan it, watch it and you've learned one thing new every day during your morning time. I think that would be a great addition as well. I had somebody mentioned to me that they were going to use them during the summer, you know, summer substitute days, days when mom just wasn't feeling up to it to make sure that some learning was still happening. But again, no prep, no stress. They're super easy. It didn't, you know, you don't have to think about it. You spend 15 minutes getting them ready one time and then you've got 100 plus activities ready to go. You just scan and go. Okay, let's take a look at some of the discovery decks and how they work. So here we have space, weather, the human body and all about animals. I'm going to show you an example question card for each. We have why do things float in space? How are raindrops formed? Why do we burp? And how do some animals function without brains? So you would just get device of your choosing. I'm going to be using my phone. You would open your camera app and then point it at the QR code and tap the link. And then you would have your child watch the video because that video is going to answer the question that was asked on the card. So they'll be able to learn more. Now, in addition to the 20 question cards for each of the topics, I've also included a kind of a graphic organizer page if you will. So if you live in a state where you need to have more proof than a video was watched or maybe you want your child to record what they've learned, there will be one of these in each of them where they can record the question that was asked, what they think the answer is before watching the video, what they learned the answer actually is drawing a picture of what they learned, writing down any interesting facts they might have learned and something that they might still be curious about that same topic. I had a fantastic time creating each of these discovery decks and so far they have been a hit in our personal home school. I hope they are hit in your home school. I would love it if you would tell me down in the comments how you would use these in your home school and what topics you might be interested in seeing me add in the future.