 Hey everybody, welcome to the LawDoc way. I'm Jessica and today's video is a homeschool favorite. So today I'm going to be sharing with you guys our summer favorite. So these are all of the things that we used in our homeschool that really stood out during the summer season. Now I know this video is a little bit late because summer has been over for a while but honestly, we live in Florida, it still felt like summer and we weren't ready for summer to be over so we're just going to pretend that summer lasted a little longer for us because we were really loving it. And like I said, it's hot enough here, it could be summer year round most of the time. So I don't know if you guys have favorites but we definitely do. Every season there are just a few things that really stand out as being like top things that really made a huge impact in our homeschool. It seems to be that normally it's a few books, a few games and then a few extra things. And of course this season is no exception to that but I like to hop on here about once a season, once a quarter, once every three to four months and share with you the things that made the biggest difference in our homeschool. So for this summer we did a lot and by a lot I mean a lot of what we deemed pool school in. We were just in the pool, having fun, doing school together and so a lot of the things that I have for you today kind of revolved around that. They revolved around us having fun in the pool together as a family. The first of which is games. So one of the things that became a huge favorite for us is I ordered a floating table and it's like really big so I'm not gonna be able to put it on camera. I will insert a picture on top of me but it was this big black floating table and we played games on top of it. With the table came these waterproof cards so it's just a deck of standard cards that are waterproof and that came with the table itself and so we played a ton of stuff. We played war, we played multiplication war where we would flip two cards and multiply them together and whoever had the highest product would win. We did that a lot for math. We played crazy eights. We played all kinds of games and then following one person wanted to play they would play solitaire and it was so much fun. We also have the waterproof UNO which is a blast. I will say these cards get a little stuck together sometimes once they get wet and it makes it kind of hard to like spread your cards out in your hand but it was fun. We laughed, it just made it an extra layer of complication to the game and we played quite a bit. UNO is one of Emily's favorites so it was a huge hit and then the last like waterproof the one that's actually sold as waterproof is the Spotted Waterproof and this you guys know, Emily loves Spotted one of her favorite games so it was a huge hit. Now these cards actually float on their own so before we got our table we were just racing throwing these down on top of the water and for the most part unless your stack out really really big they would just float on top of the water so that was really fun too. So if you had like a baby pool you wouldn't even need that float. You could just do just the game. And then the other games that made their way outside to the pool even though they were not intentionally waterproof was the Roll of Story. So these are just dice and you just roll them and tell a story. So we would take turns picking a few, rolling them and then coming up with a story and then sometimes we would do like continuations where Emily would roll two or three and start the story and then I would roll two or three and continue it and then like Kevin would roll two or three and end it. There are enough dice. I think we're rolling three a piece. Let's see. Yeah, there's 10 dice. So there was enough for us to roll three dice a piece and make a story and it was just something fun to do while we were in the pool and it also helped her with storytelling and creative writing and kind of like beginning, middle and end. So it really was a lot of fun. The other one that we played is the Think Fun Math Dice. So we have the Math Dice Junior, the Math Dice Original and the Math Dice Chase. So all of those. Now Math Dice Junior, you have kind of like this little game like board and you're moving ponds. Now that one isn't technically waterproof unless you were like maybe a laminated game board but the other ones, they're just dice. So it could be as long as you didn't put your instructions in the water. And then the other two games that were really small that worked really well, they went into a pool bag nicely and the beach bag were Word Shout and Toss Up. They're like seriously these little tiny containers and Word Shout has all of these little letter dice and you roll them and you're racing to see who can find the word the quickest with them. So that one was really great for spelling in the pool. And then Toss Up, you're actually supposed to keep a score with these. And we just would like play each round whoever won that round. And then we would just say, okay, you won five rounds. I won three rounds. So we didn't keep a score because, you know, again, we were in the pool. The other game type of thing that we really, really liked was this spell and dive set. We got so much use out of this. It is these letters that are made to sync to the bottom of the pool. And there's, I mean, tons of letters. And then you also have these waterproof cards that have words on them. And they're double-sided. So sometimes I would just throw the whole bag down and she would go down and grab five letters and try to make a word out of them. Sometimes we would throw all the letters down and we would race to see who could make the word that we had picked first. There was multiple different ways we played. There's ways that you can play that are included when you buy it. It really was just, it was so much fun to play, I mean, all together, Emily by herself. It was a great, great way to sneak in some spelling while we're in the pool that was really, really fun. The other two things that were vital to our pool schooling were a waterproof speaker. I don't even know what brand this is. I will link it for you guys. It is TreeLab. It wasn't super expensive. It wasn't really cheap, but it wasn't really expensive either. And it was great. I mean, it was loud. We could hear it while we were outside. We used it to listen to audio books. And we listened to quite a few audio books. Our favorite audio book series that we listened to were the Wizards of Once. Emily had read the first book for her book club on out school and loved it. I wanted to listen to the rest. I wanted to read the rest of them, but wanted to read them with us because she said we would love them. So we ended up doing that whole series, which is four books as of right now on audio. And that speaker was perfect for that. We would listen to audio books on it. And it was really, really great. The other thing along that same lines was my Kindle Paperwhite. It is waterproof and I used it to read out loud to her. I mean, I read a ton of stuff out loud to her while we were in the pool. I personally read a lot while we were in the pool and at the beach, but I read a lot out loud to her as well while she was swimming or diving or whatever. Speaking of the Kindle, you're not gonna see it technically, I guess in a week, you'll see it, but you haven't seen it yet. Emily got her own Kindle Paperwhite. And so she enjoyed reading and floating too, not at the beginning of the summer, but I've got it for her for our beach trip that we took when we were there for her birthday. And she absolutely loved it. Her series that she immediately dove into and read was the Warriors books. They're cats and they're warriors. And I don't know, but she really liked it. She's told me all about it. And she's read, I believe, six of those books. So that was what she really, really enjoyed this summer. And then I personally am reading a ton of mystery, suspense and thrillers. So if that is your kind of thing, I will put a link that has all of my recent reads that I've read personally. It's not really has to do with our homeschool, but I'll put it down there in case you're curious. And then the last thing that like really, really stood out for us. And it doesn't surprise me that it stood out for us. It was a blast when we did it, the first summer we did it. And we enjoyed it even more this summer with Kevin Holm. And that was our survival unit study. And you guys, I don't say this because I wrote this. I'm not trying to be like, oh yeah, you should get it because I wrote it. I mean, it is awesome. And I did literally create it for our family, but it really was a super fun way for us to all like come together and learn together as a family over the summer. It was the perfect length because these Iberia Girl books were something that I could read, something that Emily could read. It really didn't matter. We could go back and forth. Sometimes I would read them aloud. Sometimes she would read them aloud to us. It was the perfect level. It was just the right amount of information between the books and then the shows that we watched to go along with it. And the unit study, it was like the best unit that I could think of at least for this summer, for the way we were operating over the summer. It was, it really was just perfect. I can't say anything else. It was just, it got us outside even though it was hot and we really maybe wouldn't have gone outside otherwise. It got all three of us together doing things together. It taught all of us things. And there was a lot of like survival techniques and survival stuff that we got to do as a family and kind of discuss like these were our plans for this or this is what we would do if or just all of this really fun stuff. So it was the perfect unit for us over the summer. So between pool schooling and survival school, we had a blast this summer and these are just a few of our favorite things. So I would love it if you would let me know down in the comments what were some of your favorites in your home school over the summer season?