 Hey everybody! Welcome to the Laudak Way. I'm Jessica and today's video is going to be a homeschool favorites video. I realized I haven't shared homeschool favorites in a while and that's something I used to try to do a lot more frequently so I thought it was a good time to share some favorites with you. So Emily and I ran around the house, sourced some things that have been either utilized the most or some of our most favorite things in the last few months and I'm going to share all of those with you today. So we are going to go ahead and start with books first. I have two book series that we have been reading like crazy. The first one, if I don't drop them all, are the 39 Clues. This book series is so much fun. It is basically mainly a boy and a girl, brother and sister, who have been told when a relative has passed away that there is like this scavenger hunt for something that is going to change the face of the world. Like it's the most valuable, most amazing thing ever. So all of their family is now after this. They can either take a check or they can take the clues, which they all take the clues to try to find it. And it is 11 books basically of them going around different places in the world, discovering that they're related to some like amazing people like Benjamin Franklin and Mozart and learning more about them. It's a really, really great series. Emily and I both agreed it's similar to like a magic tree house, Phil, because you've got the brother and sister and it has like that sneaky learning happening because they're traveling to real places. They're talking about real landmarks and historical people. It does take some fact and run with it and turn it into fiction, but it is a really, really fun series. Now along with this series, we paired it with another favorite, which was or is our scrunch map. We have the world scrunch map and the US. I probably have shared these in multiple favorite videos. They're pretty awesome. They're mostly indestructible. You can ball them up. That kills Emily's OCD. So I nicely fold it up. But basically we had the book and essentially the scrunch map was our bookmark in the book. And when we would read, we would open the scrunch map and find the different locations that they were traveling to. Because some books, they may visit three or four different locations, you know, within that storyline. So that was kind of like a favorite favorite of ours. We enjoyed really, really, really enjoyed doing that. Another favorite book series we haven't finished yet, but we are absolutely loving it is the Explorer Academy series. These are a National Geographic or they're published by National Geographic. It is basically an Academy of Elite. And these kids are all training for missions. They're doing simulations. They're from all over the world. That's really fun. And then along with that book series, we have been pairing it with this Explorer Academy code breaking activity book, which there are like six missions in here, but each mission has multiple little codes to break. Emily loves codes and ciphers and that kind of thing. So this has been a really fun way. I've been just kind of screwing this or we'll do it, you know, alongside when we're reading the books, she'll do it while I read. It's been really, really fun and super awesome on logic. And then another thing we've been pairing with it is they have this future tech book. So some of the tech that they're talking about in Explorer Academy is kind of out there. One kid has glasses that are mood glasses. They change colors and shape based off of his mood or how he feels super cool. Obviously not real, but everything that they talk about in the book was inspired by something real. And so this book kind of explains what it was inspired by, like the actual tech that inspired it or, you know, where they got the idea for that. Or maybe even if it is real what it was based off of. So a fun tie in that gets, you know, like you learning even more. And then another book that has really, really been fun in our homeschool is this DK how everything works. I love just about anything by DK. This book is pretty hefty. It's like easily over 300 pages. But what is so awesome about it is just about anything you can think of like, I wouldn't know how a drone works. Here you go. Maybe you want to know how, let's see, how brick houses are built or more about brick houses. I mean, it says from brain cells to black holes, and it really does have that much stuff. It is split into like sections. So you have a you section, which is like everything body, a home section, a city and industry section, a living world, our planet and space. And so like I said, within that, there's tons of just how it works. So like, here is your immune system. This has been a great addition to our homeschool. It's gone really, really well with our discovery cards, because we have a whole like how it's made and how it was invented deck. And so we can pull this out and kind of go even further with them. And speaking of discovery cards, that is actually a favorite as well. We have all of them right here. I have basically been screwing one of these pretty much every day and just leaving it out next to her breakfast. And she watches the video while she eats breakfast, for the most part, if we miss it, then she watches it while she eats lunch. And I love it. I feel super amazing that she is learning something and learning something new every day, or at least being refreshed of something that we've learned in the past. I love that it's five to 10 minutes. So she's not on the screen a lot, but I also love that she is getting educational screen time. So I don't feel guilty about the screen time she is getting. And the topics range from like I literally printed all of the cards, cut them out and then shuffle them. So she's not getting like the same topic every day. I mean, sometimes she is, but it can be ocean, it can be animals, it can be plants, it can be interesting inventions, it can be how things are made, it can be weather, like there's some sort of really fun topic that she's learning more about. And then it gives us the opportunity to go down rabbit trails if she wants to learn even more about it. Like I said, that book has been an amazing one for that. Okay, we're going to talk about games next. Emily's favorite game or one of her favorite games has always, always, always been Uno. We've been playing a ton of Uno lately, but because Uno is one of her favorite games for Christmas, she also got Uno All Wild and Uno Flip, both of which have been a super fun addition to our game school. They are quick, they're fast paced, you have to kind of think on your feet. It's just been really, really fun. And because most people know how to play Uno, it makes these two really, really easy games to learn to play for like if we have friends or family over, it's different, but it's similar enough that they're not having to learn like a whole new gameplay. So those have been really, really fun additions. And then the other set of games, that's a lot. So I'm going to show them one at a time, have been the guess in 10. This happens to be the Marvel, but I have to explain first. We since probably around the COVID time started playing games with dinner because well, life was crazy and we needed something to look forward to. And as Emily has gotten older, I've really, really kept that alive. I've strived really hard to keep that alive because she's a twin-ager now and connecting with them isn't always super easy. So at least making sure that we're like having that dinner connection conversation whatever has been really, really important to us. So we've continued since then to play games over dinner together. So at the very least on a crazy day, we've been gone all day, we've, you know, have crossed paths and ships in the night, whatever. We're at least going to play a game at dinner together as the family minimum. So it started out originally with the headbands. I don't think I have one I can put my hands on, but it started out originally with the headbands game where you like wear the headband and you have the card on your forehead. We played original headbands, we played Harry Potter headbands, we played, you know, animal headbands and we would all basically just come to dinner with this crazy headband on and spend our dinner while we're eating, trying to guess, you know, what we were based off of yes or no questions. After that, we used our Professor Noggin decks for a long time. We would just, you know, roll the dice while we ate, ask the question, you know, if they got it, they got to keep the card, that kind of thing. Whoever had the most cards at the end of the dinner for us was the winner. We have played, let's see, other trivia based games, not anything that requires a board and moving. And if it did, we would just take the trivia cards out of it and ask the questions and then just collect the questions. We played like Christmas trivia over, you know, the month of Christmas. We just whatever is simple and that we can, you know, do, we've done. But the guess and 10s because there are so many of them and because they're pretty simple to play, even if, you know, again, we have a family member saying, you know, with us for dinner or we have a friend over, like it's easy for them to jump in. And there are some in here that are just super fun. There are some that are educational. It has just, it's been perfect. Like we've gone through, I don't even know how many we have. I think we own almost all of them. And we've gone through all of them at this point. And we're probably going to start again, because they're just, they have been our absolute favorite. So we have the guess and 10 Marvel version, which was a lot of fun. We have guess and 10 deadly dinosaurs. Emily won this every single night. I'm just going to go ahead and be honest. Guess and 10 foods around the world. This was really a fun one because as we played this, there would be something that would come up that we would be like, oh, that looks really good. And we would maybe like add it to our meal plan for the next week and have something for dinner. Like for example, we made a falafel because it was one of the cards that Emily was like, oh, that looks really yummy. Guess and 10 inspiring professions. This was another fun one that led down some rabbit trails where we talked about professions that maybe weren't as common. Guess and 10 world of sports. This was a fun one because if there was a sport we didn't recognize or we didn't maybe Emily was like, wait, what is that? We would watch a quick video clip on whatever it was, like sumo wrestling. Emily was like, wait, what? They wear diapers and wrestle each other. So we had to watch something on sumo wrestling. So again, super fun rabbit trails. Guess and 10 things that go. Kevin won almost every night on this one. Guess and 10 animal planet. You guys know Emily won that one every single night. Guess and 10 underwater animals. This one just so happened to like come out right as we finished or we bought it right as we finished our ocean unit. So it was a lot of fun to do this one because we had finished our ocean unit and we were like doing it and then we were still learning even more after having spent three months doing it. Like we would look up, you know, one of the animals and learn even more about them. You know, it was it was a lot of fun. Let's see. Guess and 10 States of America and I'm going to also go ahead and throw out the guess and 10 countries of the world. Now with these what we did because Emily was was not great with geography. Kevin and I are not really great with geography either. We printed and laminated depending on which one we were doing and use it like a placemat like a US map or a world map. And we would say things like are you in the Southwest? Are you in the Northwest? Like are you in Africa? Are you in Europe? And so these we were playing guess and 10 games were connecting as a family, but we were like really digging into geography too. So it was so so much fun. Like I can't even tell you how much we all learned doing these two. And then as a follow up after we did the countries, we went ahead and did the legendary landmarks because at that point we felt like okay, now we kind of know what the countries are. Maybe we can do the landmark one and it was again a lot of fun to do. And then the last one, which is probably all of our favorites because we're partial was the guess and 10 Disney. And for this one, what was really fun is we would see some of them and we'd be like, oh man, we haven't watched that movie in a while. Same thing with Marvel and we would end up watching that movie for family movie night. So what I really loved most about these is it was a game that was super easy. It took zero setup. I mean, once you learn it, you've learned it. It was easy to play. We would just, you know, grab the deck. We would do a few that night and we would put them to the back of the deck. And so then when we started the following night, we would just start with the ones we hadn't done. It would take us about maybe a week to two weeks to get through, you know, all of them. And they all led to something like the food one, we were, you know, making different dishes. The Disney and the Marvel, we were like, oh, let's watch that movie for movie night this week. Some of them led down rabbit trails. Like some of them we had genuine conversations about like, oh, that's a sport I would like to try or that's a profession I would never want to do. And it just, it's really, it was really fun. Like we've done a lot of games at dinner, but that was, have definitely been our top, top favorite. So if you're looking for like an easy way to get more games in your day, like ad food, do it, do it with snacks, do whatever lunch over dinner, sometime when all of your family is going to be together anyway, and I highly recommend and pick a topic they like. Do they love Marvel? Grab the Marvel one. Like it's still super educational. Okay, because this is sitting right here next to me, this has become part of our homeschool like daily skills, demands, to-dos, whatever. It's not really homeschool, but it's on our homeschool to-do list anyway. These are archery trainers. Basically each one is a different pound. This is 25 pounds. This is 35 pounds. And this one is 45 pounds. And each of us do at least five every day with each arm to just kind of train. Archery takes a very specific set of muscles even as much as Kevin and I work out. It is still muscles that we don't necessarily hit, at least not in the correct ways. So it's really easy. You hold it in one hand. I'm gonna probably not be able to get it on camera. And you're like pulling it back with the other and essentially simulating the movement that you would do with a bow to strengthen those muscles. And they're cheap. They're like $14.99. It's so much easier than having to, because we only do archery one or two times a week, because it's so much equipment to like get out and to string your bow and to put your glove on and to put your arm guard on. And we love it, but this is so much easier to like still get in that daily practice without having to get everything out and plus dry firing a bow is a really bad idea. So this allows you to do that. And if you were to, you know, let it go, it's not going to mess your bow up. So those have been a favorite. We all got one for Christmas in our stocking. I'm not going to tell you who uses what pound. I'll let you guess, but it's probably not what you think. Emily has shot a lot longer than Kevin and I in those specific archery muscles are a lot stronger than ours. Okay, subscription box. The favorite subscription box lately that Kevin and Emily have been like doing on repeat that Emily begs for has been the crunch lab. She absolutely knows our address, sorry, has been loving it. Like if he gives her a choice when they sit down to do subscription boxes, it's can we do a crunch lab please. She really likes Mark Rober in general. She likes watching the videos that he makes. She likes that they're like interesting and different. They've done recently they just did like this little mini foosball thing. They also made a car that is really nifty because it goes forward however many feet and then it stops and turns around and goes backwards without having to like do anything. She loves them. She would do them every day if that many of them came in. So that has been hands down the homeschool favorite subscription box lately. Okay, I think I just have a couple of mom type of things left. This is pins. I got new pins in my stocking at Christmas time. Emily has been stealing them. Kevin has been stealing them. They have become everybody's favorite. It is a sharpie gel pin. Normally I prefer like a 0.9 millimeter or larger because I tend to write bigger and I like that. These are 0.7. They're so, so smooth. I've been homeschool planning with them, journaling with them, writing to-do lists daily with them, hands down my favorite and everybody's been stealing them for me. This is a box of 12 and I think there's only five left in here. So I'll definitely be buying another box of these very soon. I will say I do wish they came in more colors. I think they only come in four colors. I wish they had like the pinks and purples and all that stuff. That would be amazing. Okay, so technically we're just going to go ahead and show this. My Kindle Paperwhite has and will always be a favorite of mine. That's not actually what I'm showing you guys. And don't judge me because what I'm about to show you makes me probably the laziest person on the planet, but it's amazing. So I begged for this for Christmas. It is a Kindle page turner. You clip it to the side of your Kindle and then basically you push this little button and it's going to, let's see if you can see it, it's gonna turn the page for you. Now, yes, I know I can easily just tap this and that turns the page. Again, I said this is going to make me the laziest person in the world, but the more that I have read because of this stinking page clicker is crazy because I can, especially now that it's like winter and I'm cold, I can be bundled up. I can prop my Kindle up on a pillow. My arms can be in the blanket. I don't have to keep taking it out to press the thing. I've been reading for 75 hard and I tend to read on my Kindle because then I don't have to turn lights on and disturb Kevin. First thing in the morning and I can prop it up on my nightstand on like my cup and read, you know, still late in bed, still half asleep, and I'm getting my 10 pages read that way. So much easier. Also, I've been doing it, you know, when I didn't feel well, like in January, we were, I don't know, probably two to three weeks sick down like horrible flu and my entire body hurt, but I could prop this up on a pillow and I think I read like 12 books in January while we were sick because I could just not really move. Like you're only have to push with them or even a pointer. So a pit of me of lazy, yes, I know, but I've probably read at least twice as much because it's just so much more convenient, like so much easier. So there's that. And then the last thing I have is a book that I have read and I'm rereading because it was so good and it is called More Than a Mom. It is how prioritizing your wellness helps you and your family thrive. And it is kind of something that is really near and dear to my heart. It's a book that I read probably over a year ago and I like read it, skimmed it, whatever you want to call it quickly. And it's kind of part of what was like, okay, I can really do this and I can do this without feeling guilty when I started my health journey, or my wellness, get better, become a better version of me, whatever you want to call it journey. And I was like, I can do this because it's going to benefit my family and I'm not going to feel guilty about it. And I totally did. And so now I'm rereading it because now I'm ready to hear even more of it like I wasn't ready to hear and process all of it then like I am now. And it's even better than I remember it being. So basically like the little synopsis on the back is empower your kids by caring for your own soul, which obviously we know is true even though we have a really hard time doing it as moms. And so it talks about developing 10 attainable life habits that will strengthen your mothering by strengthening you, build friendships that bring true encouragement into your life, quit the negative self-talk and make peace with your body, develop effective ways to conquer stress and anxiety, and then know your worth so you can embrace your purpose. So this has probably been one of my favorite books so far in this journey. I have a few others, but this is definitely up there in a top five. And that's it. That's all of our homeschool favorites from the past probably I would say five to six months. And now I would absolutely love it if you would tell me down in the comments what have been some of your favorite things in your homeschool in the past, you know, five, six, seven, eight months because maybe I need to add them to ours.