 Hey you guys, my name is Brittany and welcome back to my YouTube channel. You guys in today's video, I'm going to share with you our book review for the 2022-2023 homeschooling year. So if any of you guys are new here to my channel, again, my name is Brittany. I'm a homeschooling mom to three girls who will be entering in sixth kindergarten and pre-k this upcoming homeschool year. So you guys, if you've seen all my channel already, I already released all of my read alouds and independent readers for my sixth grader this upcoming homeschool year. However, a lot of you guys have requested for me to finally put out my book review for all the books that we read last homeschooling year, our favorites. And you guys, it was so hard for me and my daughter to like narrow down all of our favorites because we have read a total of 85 books this homeschooling year. And it's just so amazing when you look back at all the books that you read, you look back at like the reading logs and things like that, how quickly the books they do add up. We've read a mixture of picture books and chapter books in my homeschool. I definitely feel like reading picture books, especially with like your upper elementary kiddos is still really, really important. So I definitely read a lot of books with Brielle, my oldest daughter. Now as far as my younger kiddos or whatever, I typically just read like the regular Eric Karl books. I read a lot of nursery rhymes and things like that with them. A lot of books I read with my younger too was definitely like on repeat. I do have my favorite like preschooling books that I have read with my kiddos and I will go ahead and link that video down below if you guys have like preschoolers or kindergarteners that you do want to share. Hey, let me finish. I'm making a video. Okay, you guys. So let's go ahead and get into the video. I have categorized some of the different books in category. So I'm going to be sharing all of Brielle's favorite independent favorite reads that she read. I'm going to share the independent assigned readers that she's read that she enjoyed. I'm also going to share books from our history curriculums that we really, really enjoyed. Some from Blossom and Root, some from Heart and Soul. And I'm also going to share our fun, our favorite books that we had in our fun read aloud. So I'm going to go ahead and start off with Brielle's favorite independent fund readers, her favorite books that she's read. Now I think Brielle, she's read a total of 10 fund readers and 16 independent assigned readers that I had. So she read a total of 26 chapter books this whole homeschooling year. And so as far as like all of her favorites out of the 26, these are like her top favorites. So her first favorite fun read was Operation Sisterhood. And this book is about a group of homeschooling kiddos who pretty much joined a musical band together. Brielle just told me she really enjoyed this book because it was lighthearted and it was fun. So those were her words in describing Operation Sisterhood. So this looked like a fun book from the cover. And that was really the only reason why I purchased it for it for her. And I'm so happy she enjoyed this one. Another one of Brielle's independent fund reads that she read was Mangle Delight. And I really think Brielle enjoyed this book right here Mangle Delight because it's a middle grade reader and it dealt with Mangle really having issues and problems with I guess socialization, making friends. And it really incorporated a lot of that. And I think Brielle really really enjoyed it because of that aspect. And I think she really enjoyed the ending of this book. And I'm not going to give any spoilers, but Mangle Delight, friendships, frenemies, coming together, social anxieties, things like that. This book will cover it. Brielle's ultimate favorite book that she said that she read this whole homeschooling year was The Sweetest Sound. And this is about 10 year old Candice who she is trying to break out of her shell. She loves to write exactly like how my daughter loves to write. And she's a singer and she's just scared to sing in front of her church. And you guys like Brielle, she really really enjoyed this one. I remember after she finished reading each chapter, she would come to me and tell me some things that she enjoyed and she liked about it. So if you have, you know, a fifth grader or a middle grade read that you want your girl to read, especially a shy girl, this is a great one. Now as far as Brielle's fun independent or not her fun reason as far as like her independent assigned readers, I pulled a lot of her independent assigned readers from our Blossom and Root curriculum. She read Morning Girl, Alliance to Guard Us, she read Pedro's Journal, Pocahontas and the Stranger. Those are just a few of her independent assigned readers that I did assign for her to read on her own. However, her favorite series that I assigned for her to read was the American Girl Addy series. And she read both the Addy and the Felicity series, but she definitely said the Addy was her favorite. So it comes with the whole series like Meet Addy changes for Addy. So it's like a total of like six books all together in this series. And she really, really enjoyed this one. This book really followed along the time period with our curriculum when we were going over the Civil War. And if you are going into like American history and you have a girl, please don't shy out in reading any of the American Girl series. I remember reading these when I was growing up and I really, really enjoyed them. And I'm so happy that Brielle enjoyed them as well. So American Girl series Addy was her favorite independent assigned readers. So you guys, let's go ahead and get into our read alouds and the books that we read together just me and Brielle and our favorites here are all of our read alouds that we did together. Some of them we did a literature guide or we did like some form of discussion questions with that I found online. And others we just simply read them and listen to them on Audible. So the first book we read to start off our homeschooling year was the Lemonade War. And if you guys are new to my channel, you already know I haven't been talking about this book so much because we really, really enjoyed it. A great fun read. It was definitely a fun kickoff to like the start of our school year because the setting of this is in summer going into their school year. Right now we actually have finished the second book and we're halfway done with the third book in the series and it really hasn't let us down. We have been laughing all summer reading the last or reading the books two and three of the Lemonade War series. I believe it's six all together and they definitely have been all really, really fun reads. Great books. The second book we read was The Secret Zoo and you guys this was like a fantasy adventure series. This was about Noah trying to find his sister Megan in The Secret Zoo. It was just full of like adventures. Each of the end of the stories, it definitely left us on a cliffhanger. It was really fun listening to this one on Audible, listening to the narrator narrate this one. It was really, really great. We really enjoyed this one. So The Secret Zoo, definitely a great one. Brie, I love this one. For Christmastime, we read The Christmas Carols and you guys this was a great heartfelt story about Holly who is pretty much her and her family. They're called the carols and they're like the Christmassy family. They moved to a new area. Holly begins her new adventure starting off school because up until this point Holly is home school. We really follow along Holly as she is making friends. She's changing herself to fit and conform and then she refines herself all over again. The school needs Holly and her Christmassy spirit and it definitely saves the day. It was a great read you guys. I was crying at the end and I really enjoyed this one and if you guys see my read aloud picks, we are reading the second book of during our Christmastime this year which is Holly and the Christmas competition. So I'm really, really excited to read the second book in the series. It releases in September so that's when I'm going to purchase it and hopefully the second one doesn't let us down but this was a great fun one. Definitely a family appropriate nothing crazy in this one. Now to start off our January of this year we read Planet Earth is Blue and I kind of wanted us to read a book kind of correlating with space. This was a great book. Definitely a middle read book. This book followed along Nova who is an autistic young girl and we follow along I guess her journey. In this book we listen to this on audible. We are in Nova's head and Nova loves space. We are following along the space timeline and you guys this definitely was um I love the conversations we had in this book. It was great. This was a sad book but for some reason Brielle still said this was one of her favorite books. I think it is just when it comes to life and life's hardships a lot of times when we read it in a book and we read it in a narrative I really feel like it brings it alive. We're able to have discussions and this was a great one you guys. Definitely I definitely would say sixth to eighth grade. You wouldn't want to really read this with your elementary kiddos. Brielle definitely I definitely would say she was mature and ready for the content in this book but it was really really great. We had great discussions about how we treat people with disabilities and you guys this was an awesome one. You know I really don't have any more words to say but this was a great middle grade read. If you have a middle schooler this will be a great independent read for them and or a read that you can read together. We ended off our homeschooling year. Our last real out we read was The Witch of Black Burpan and we did a literature guide with this one from Rachel from Where You Learned That and you guys this was a great book. It followed along the time period of the Puritans in Connecticut. We followed along Kit's Journey from Barbados. You guys like this book really stretched Brielle because it's written in like this like old English format. The vocabulary was really really high for her and I really liked how it did stretch her. We did have to stop and look up some words so she can understand it and I'm really really happy we listened to this one on Audible. I'm happy she followed along with it with the independent literature guide. We really was able to squeeze out all the meat out of this book and you know I'm really really enjoying using literature guides when it comes to harder reads especially in formats like this but it was a great book. Brielle really really enjoyed it and I definitely feel like the literature guide from Rachel from Where You Learned That really really spiced this book up for us to end off our homeschooling year. So those were our read-alots that we read. Now as far as Blossom and Root of River of Voices we read a lot of picture books with that curriculum but I'm going to highlight our top two books that we read with that curriculum and that was Children of the Longhouse and in this book right here this is a coming-of-age book about Ograri and his sister I forgot what her his sister's name but we're following along two twins and I really love listening to this one on Audible because I was at first when I started reading this book I know I was pronouncing all of the names wrong in this book and we had a hard time following it but when I purchased the Audible credit and we listened to it on Audible it really made this be a really enjoyable book. This was a great book when we were in the Indigenous People Unit and I really really enjoyed this one definitely will recommend if you do do this one definitely listen to it on Audible you'll be able to follow the narrative a lot better. I love the character qualities that Ograri he demonstrated in this book sharing love and kindness and how he treated people despite how they treated him. Great book for character but this was a great one we read. Another book I want to highlight which is a reference book that I used a lot when we were doing River of Voices was Turtle Island and this book right here is the story of North America's first people and I really love the illustrations in this book we were using before Columbus but I felt like the text and the content was a little bit high for Brielle to really understand what was going on and when I grabbed this book this Brielle had a better understanding of Indigenous people truthful gentle and it was really really informative and I really loved us using this book as a reference book when we were going over Indigenous people. So if you are doing early American history and you want an additional reference book especially if you have an upper elementary like a fourth and up this is definitely a great one this can actually be an independent assigned reader as well because it's really really simple it has a lot of pictures in it and Brielle really enjoyed it when we used this book as well when we were using Blossom and Root. Now I'm going to go and talk about our favorite history curriculum we used this year which was from Heart and Soul from the Heritage Mom Block we absolutely loved it we read a total of I believe it's 22 picture books we've read we've read two chapter books the two chapter books was 40 acres and a mule and Stella by Starlight I lost the cover to this one so that's why I'm showing you guys the corner but this book or Heart and Soul we read the two chapter books and then we actually used our reference book which was Heart and Soul and this is the story of America and African Americans and you guys first and foremost this is a great book the illustrations are great if you're looking for a gentle and truthful history this is a great start pretty much these two books right here if you want to you know do something on your own and just have like a lighter history if you just read these two books you will definitely cover American history in a gentle and truthful way and I really really enjoyed this book because we were really able to look at history American history through the African American perspective which was so awesome so I'm going to just highlight some of Brielle's favorite picture books because again with Heart and Soul we read a total of 22 picture books some of them I checked out from the library and some of them you guys I just had to purchase because Brielle really really enjoyed them so our first favorite picture book we read was about Duke Ellington we actually listened to this one on Hoopla they had like a cool audible and we were listening to the jazz in the background and Brielle really really enjoyed learning about Duke Ellington the illustrations in this book is amazing and this was a great read another one of our favorite books was Freedom on the Menu and again we listened to this one as well I love the illustrations in this book this book pretty much just talks about equal rights and pretty much you know when it was a point where blacks wasn't allowed to sit in the you know actual dining room in a dining table to be able to be served ice cream and it just goes over that time period where where at the beginning you know African Americans wasn't able to sit at the front of the dining table and in the end they are able to sit at it great gentle history truthful and I definitely feel like this was a great age appropriate read for my daughter another one Brielle really enjoyed was Gordon Park she really enjoyed loving and hearing about Gordon Parks and his photography and how he captured America again we listened to this one on Hoopla you guys if you have your library system and you do have Hoopla please utilize it because they do have some cool audible finds on it as well and it's completely free so we really really enjoyed this one loved hearing about the history of Gordon Parks and it was a really really great fun picture book another picture book we started Off Heart and Soul which was Brick by Brick and this goes over the account of how the White House was built I love the poetry in this book and the way that the rhyming repetition is and it's really really a great one the illustrations are beautiful and the last or the last couple of books that Brielle enjoyed was I Heard of a Land and this pretty much is about African American pioneers in the Oklahoma Territory and then the last book that we read was Rosa and I think she really enjoyed this one again because we listened to this one using Hoopla and it really didn't just talk about you know the Rosa Parks that we know it really gave another perspective in a backstory of Rosa Parks and then all the other accounts that was happening during this time period and Brielle really really loved this one great illustrations and I loved using picture books you guys and teaching Brielle American history I feel like that was the best thing that I did this homeschooling year so you guys like these are all the books that we read these are not all the books we read but these are all our favorites that I pulled out for you guys in today's video and you guys like I I'm really really happy that we had a really heavy literature rich year we loved all the books and I really hope going forward that we can continue to you know add in picture books and add in really really fun literature I'm especially when I'm adding in like my younger ones and for Brielle we're you know doing more heavier chapter books with literature guides and things like that so I'm really really excited to continue in I guess this literature rich homeschool that I am creating for us so you guys I really hope you enjoy I really hope you can find some nuggets and some good books for you to read in your upcoming homeschool year as always thank you guys so much for watching and I look forward to seeing everybody in my next one bye