 Hey everybody, welcome to the Wallach Way. I'm Jessica, and today's video is going to be our homeschool favorites. Now in the past, I have shared our favorites almost every single quarter or season. And this year, somehow the entire year got away from me and I haven't shared any of our homeschool favorites, so I thought it would be a really fun thing to do as we wrap up the homeschool year to just pull some of our top games and books and kind of the things that all three of us felt like really made a difference in our homeschool this year. So I'm gonna share all of our top homeschool favorites from the 2021-2022 homeschool year. Now I'm gonna start with books first because well, that's like a huge staple in our homeschool. This is Emily Stack, so I had her go through and pick her top favorite books from this school year that she herself had read. And the first ones we have are the Animal Adventure Club. There was three in this series and she loved these. She has actually read them multiple times and she highly recommends them, especially if you like animals. And then the rest of her books that she loved were part of her book club that she does on outschool, which I will link below because it was something else that she said was one of her favorites from this year. She loved doing it, she loved all of the books that Miss Mary picked to do for Book Club, but I made her narrow it down. So her top three that they read for Book Club are from the mixed up files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler, Wish Tree, and Crenshaw. And then our top read aloud from this school year were a wolf called Wander and Whale of the Wild. And these two are by the same author and I seriously recommend these if you have an animal lover. This, both of these were amazing books. They are fiction, but they have a lot of nonfiction components within them. There's tons of animal facts. They're just really, really fun. They were really great for read alouds. We paired them with some documentaries and made it really fun. Highly recommend them. And then we followed that up because we loved them so much with packs as well as the second one, Packs the Journey Home, both of which we absolutely loved and they made really, really great read alouds and were loved by everybody, huge favorites. So that is our book stack. And next I'm gonna just jump right into the games. Games is always a really difficult one used to when we would do this seasonally. We would each pick a favorite and so it was kind of easy. We had about three games. This was very difficult. So instead of picking favorites, I went through and I picked our most played games for the 2021, 2022 school year because our tastes vary so much. So we would have, I don't know, this was the best way for me to narrow it down. So the first one I have is Lumps. And the reason that this got played so much is because this lives in my purse. It's so easy. It's so small and it travels with us. So it just has these cute little dice and then you just need something to keep score on. So any kind of paper and pen or you can use your note app on your phone or whatever we've used it all. It's just, like I said, so small, so convenient. It lives in my purse. It goes with us everywhere. It's a great way to do some math. It just was like fantastic. That is absolutely always with us. Along with Spot It, but you guys have seen Spot It so many times. I didn't pull it out, although it definitely ranks as one of our favorites. It's probably actually our most played game if we were to talk about Spot It in general. Although we have multiple different varieties. So we play multiple different ones so it didn't actually hit number one. But if we were just to say Spot It in general, it would probably be our most played game. It gets played all the time. And one of the varieties lives in my purse along with lumps constantly. Emily's most requested game, so it got played a ton, is Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza. It is really fun and it's really fast, which is great. So you're like focusing on that visual discrimination when you're playing it. And like I said, it's a favorite. We always laugh, we always giggle. So anytime we're having a rough homeschool day, I'll be like, hey, let's play Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza. And by the time we finish, we're laughing. Whatever was kind of turning the day rotten has turned around and we can continue with smiles and laughs on our faces, which is great. All right, next we have Possum. This is one that got played a ton because as you guys all know, Yachty is Kevin's absolute favorite game, which by the way, it is in the stack too because literally, Yachty is probably number two right behind Spotted for the game that we play the most. And Possum is kind of a word version of that. So you're rolling letter dice and you're trying to find three, four and five letter nouns and three, four and five letter verbs and three, four and five letter adjectives, which all add up to points. Very similar to Yachty. Even the scorecard is very similar to a Yachty scorecard. So it was a great way to still play a game that Kevin absolutely loved with a little bit of a word twist to it and have some word fun and practice some of those spelling and grammar skills. So it is one that got played a lot. So right up there with Yachty was Possum. I have a few two-player games because me and Emily like to play kind of head-to-head two-player games sometimes when it's just the two of us. One of our most played favorites is Canoodle head-to-head. It is very similar to the single-player Canoodle where you are trying to complete kind of the puzzle that they've given you except you are racing a person sitting across from you trying to see who can do it first. So it's really, really great for logic but also kind of that speed component and we really enjoy racing for that one. The other two-player game that got played the most by us, actually this probably was the most period because it is my favorite game and I would play it constantly. If she would let me, was Blockus duo and it's kind of the way it goes. Like if she gets to pick, this is the one she picks. If I get to pick, this is the one I pick and I just love it. It's so much fun, it's so easy. It plays pretty quickly. I would say about 15 minutes or less. Maybe 25 if we're really, really pushing it and trying to be like all logical about it but you just take turns laying down pieces similar to Tetris and then whoever gets rid of the most pieces is the winner. Let's see, next I have Asmundi which is probably our top-played math game. I really, really love that you can play at different levels while you're playing at the same time. I love that it includes all the operations or that you can do all the operations. It's not just limited to addition or subtraction. You can do all of them and I love that there's, like I said, different levels. So I can play at one level while she's playing at another. There's room to grow with it. It's relatively small. So it was easy to pack when we would go on field trips or stay at hotels and have a math game with us. It doesn't take up a lot of room. It's not messy. So it is one that got a lot of game time in our house along with word around. Also got a ton of game time because it's just so much fun. So you have these cards and it will show you like, okay here you can see it's blue. So when I flip it over you are trying to find the word that is in the blue circle and whoever says it first gets that card. Whoever gets the most cards is the winner, obviously. But some of you are like literally standing on your head sometimes trying to read it. You're like, wait, what does that say? And I love it because it has brought up so many discussions about vocabulary and the different definitions of words and phonics review because it's like, oh wait, I forgot that those two letters make that sound. It's just been a really, really fun one and it kind of reminds me of Spot It because you're racing to find the word first and so it has that feel of the game that we already really love. But again, kind of like Possum it brings in that word play and that word fun for us to practice. So that hands down a winner and then again it's small, like it's the size of my hand. So it's easy to travel with as well. Like those were probably the two things. If we were going somewhere I knew I could grab these two off the shelf and have language arts and math covered while we were on a trip. They were small. They didn't take up a lot of room. They played quickly and it was just a little bit of a review. So that's why those two got so much gameplay this homeschool year. Another one that was a top favorite that got a ton of gameplay is Scrambled States of America. This has been a favorite of ours for a very long time. I absolutely love that you're learning a ton about the states and the capitals that there's a book that goes along with it that it's funny, that you don't have to know the information going in that you can play it even if you haven't memorized your states and capitals yet but you're still learning like I said a ton along the way it's talking about vowels and phonics and syllables. So it's not even just geography. There's a lot of other things in it but it is just a lot of fun. And I love that it has that hidden kind of learning aspect, kind of stealth learning to it. And then last game, but definitely and not least is Quirkle. This has probably made it into my favorites multiple times. It has also been on every gift guide we've ever done. Quirkle is one of our favorites. It gets played a ton in our house. It is almost always my pick for family game night much like Yahtzee is always Kevin's. I just love it. So that is another homeschool favorite. Okay, so that's books and games. So now we're gonna just kind of talk about a few extras that really made an impact in our homeschool this past homeschool year. One of the things that really made a huge impact was the deductive thinking mindbenders. Now we've done these for a few years but this year Emily really took off with them and I just love seeing her do that. Like this is level three. When she did level one and level two I would kind of have to sit beside her and walk her through it and kind of help her narrow it down. And it was just really, really cool to see this year. She just totally flew with it. Like she didn't need help. She didn't need me to read it to her. She would do it and then just have me check it. And while that was kind of bittersweet for me it was also really awesome to see how much her thinking and logical and critical skills had just blossomed. And we owe it all to, we owe a lot of it to either single player logic games or these mindbender type of workbooks but this is by far her favorite. So if you're looking for some logic or critical thinking the mindbenders from critical thinking company are our favorites. We also really, really enjoyed the addition of this poetry series by Brian Cleary to our homeschool. These were books that we got I believe from Rainbow Resources last summer and each one just covered a different type of poetry in a fun way. So like this is list poems. The first few pages always tells you what that type of poem is. And then there is 20 to 30 pages of poems like that type of poem. So there was list poems, haikus, concrete poems, acrostic poems, limericks and quatrains. And what I loved doing with these is I would just randomly pick one every so often. There was never like a rhyme or a reason or a schedule to it. I would just randomly be like, okay, you know what, we're gonna do quatrains for the next few weeks or a month or whatever and we would read what a quatrain was, what type of poetry that it was, what it consisted of to write one. We would take turns reading the poems within the book and then we would practice writing our own. So we would write one or two and then the next day we would read three or four more poems taking turns and we'd write another one or two and we just worked our way through the entire series of books doing that. So over the course of this homeschool year we learned a lot of different types of poetry and we wrote a ton of poetry and some were hilarious and some were a little more serious. We just had a blast doing it. I wish I had the one Emily wrote in front of me. If I remember two, I will try to add a picture here but it was something to the effect of a unicorn and you had to watch out because she tinkled, she shot out sprinkles when she tinkled and if you weren't watching while she was flying in the sky it would get in your eye or something. It was hilarious, she drew a picture to go with it. It was like the best thing ever. I can't wait to put it in her portfolio and save it forever because we just had so much fun doing it and bouncing at poetry ideas off of each other and learning more, it was fun. And I actually think we may even use them again next year and do the same thing because it was just so enjoyable and I love the idea of exposing her to poetry even more. Along those same lines, another thing that we fell absolutely in love with that we will continue doing because it was a total favorite is our journal time which I just recently did a video about this so I will link it up here in the eye in the sky for you. We have been like about every other week sitting down and journaling together and we just use our sprocket which is another favorite that I have here for you. It's the HP sprocket that prints sticker pictures. We've been using this for everything and we just print the pictures out. We stick them in our journals and then we write about them. It can be kind of mundane moments. It can be trips we've gone on. It can be whatever we just write whatever we're thinking or whatever we feel like writing about but it has been something that really made an impact this year in our home school. I watched Emily's writing blossom from her trying to write the shortest sentence or use the fewest words to really expressing herself because she was excited about writing and looking forward to writing and she was using bigger words and I finally watched her writing meet her verbal skills like for the first time this year while we were journaling and doing poetry because she was enjoying it so much because we were having so much fun and it was just such an amazing thing to watch. So those two things as far as language arts made a huge impact and I'm so, so glad we incorporated them. They were hands down my favorite part of our home school year. And then I already mentioned the HP sprocket which is a printer. It became kind of vital once I got it. In our home school we were using it for our journals. We were using it for our history timeline books like literally anything I could think to take a picture and stick it on something we were using it. I could really see using it for like your planner or for portfolio purposes. I keep a digital portfolio currently but if I was to ever switch back to pen and paper I could totally see printing pictures and sticking it in a physical portfolio would just be so easy and so convenient. So I think that's a really, really great feature. Okay, so another thing that became super useful and a favorite were our Mathological Liar cards. Now we've used the third grade and now the fourth grade in this set. I will more than likely purchase the fifth grade. It's something that Kevin and Emily started doing together which made it even more special and Emily loves it. She's obsessed with Odd Squad anyway and it kind of feels Odd Squad like. So you get these different cases and in the case there's like some sort of math problem and each person tells you why they aren't guilty of that crime or that case. And in order to tell you why they're not guilty they give you math. Well if their math works out to be correct then they're innocent and if their math works out to be incorrect then they're guilty and you can have multiple people guilty so they can't just take the easy way out and say oh well it's so and so did it because the first card that they do is wrong. We had one recently where three of the four people in the case were wrong. So they have to do the math for all four cards but she enjoys it. She has her little spiral notebook like Odd Squad and she will do the math willingly and loves it and enjoys it and sometimes it's even more difficult math than what we would have potentially asked her to do and it's word problems which is something that I feel like she could use work on. So they have gotten a lot of use in our homeschool this year and she loves them and like I said she's already asked for us to get grade five and so we will be doing that. So if you have somebody who either loves math or maybe even is reluctant to math I would say these are really, really huge in our homeschool and so maybe they would be in yours as well. And then Kevin's hands down favorites along with Emily were two specific math, sorry science subscriptions that really made a huge difference in our homeschool this year and they are both from MelScience and that is the MelPhysics subscription as well as the MelChemistry subscription. So both of these have been something that Emily and Kevin have loved. They've loved doing them together. They have learned a ton doing them. We've gotten numerous subscriptions over the years. We have a few that stick around no matter what we have a few that we rotate in and out. Both of these have already been renewed for next homeschool year because they were such amazing hits this year and they were able to tinker. They were able to learn more about chemicals. They were able to have these amazing reactions and these really cool inventions that they did and it was just really great for them to be able to do it together but also realistically Emily could have done them by herself because MelScience also has this really cool app where it has videos and it walks you through step-by-step everything to do. So while she didn't really need Kevin and she could have totally done them by herself, they still enjoyed doing them together, I think secretly because Kevin likes them as much as she does. He thinks they're fun. There's a lot of toy-like components to them and they have a great time doing them but don't think that you have to have an adult because like I said, the physics is eight plus and I would stand by totally an eight-year-old could do it and the chemistry I think is 10 plus and again, I would stand by I think a 10-year-old could do it by themselves as long as they were safe enough to be able to handle chemicals and know to wear gloves and their safety glasses when they were told to do so in the video. Both of those hands down will enter our homeschool again. That is almost everything. I only have one more thing to show you and it's because it was just so convenient and while we didn't use it a ton, I now cannot imagine homeschooling without it and it is a cube timer and it's because it's so convenient, like all these little numbers that you're seeing on the side, when you flip them up, it starts timing to that time. So you don't have to set it, you don't have to do anything. It sits actually right here behind me and if I'm like, okay, in five minutes, we're gonna do this or you need to do this for five minutes or we need to time something for five minutes, we would just take it when it's on the five and flip it up and it would be timing five minutes and it will go off at the end of five minutes. Same thing if it's like, okay, let's do 10 minutes worth of math, there's 10, you just flip it and it's ready to go. So it's just a really convenient way, sorry, to be able to time different things or a set a quick timer if I need to, like okay, we're gonna do this for 10 minutes or in five minutes I'm gonna be ready to do this with you so you need to be ready to or even cooking. I mean, it's gotten used a ton in our homeschool this past homeschool year. So that is pretty much everything. While I could have showed you a ton more stuff because we had so much fun this year and there were so many things that made a huge impact, these are the top things that we felt like not only made an impact in our homeschool year, it became a favorite but really kind of made a difference in our homeschool year, got used the most, made a favorite memory while we were doing it or something along those lines. And so I hope you enjoyed seeing them. I hope you enjoyed these homeschool favorites and I would really, really love it if you would tell me down in the comments some of your homeschool favorites from this past homeschool year. So what are some books or games or additional things that just really made a difference in your homeschool, things that you now can't imagine homeschooling without or things that are definitely gonna be in your homeschool again next year because maybe I need to add them to mine.