 Hey everybody, welcome to Swadok Bay. I'm Jessica and today's video is a back to school Amazon haul. You guys, this is a lot. I'm just gonna go ahead and say it and I'm gonna preface it by saying you do not need any of this to homeschool successfully. This is a mixture of things I wanted, things I thought Emily would enjoy, things you know I was excited to add to her homeschool but you really don't need any of it. You can just homeschool with library card and you wouldn't need anything else. So please know that going in but because we don't purchase a lot of curriculum it gives us the ability to purchase a lot of really fun resources for our homeschool and so that's what I'm going to share with you guys today. I'm just gonna start because if I zoomed the camera out right now I am surrounded by stuff. Okay first thing, first I have a what your sixth grader needs to know. I'm going to be honest and a little bit sad because this is the last year that this is created. I've had every one of these since pre-k. I just like being able to reference it. I mean adults really necessarily need it. I also don't love that this copy is in black and white. The previous copies of the years were in color. This is probably dated just a little bit but I like having it as a reference. I like the poetry selections normally. I like some of the English selections. I like that they're essentially readings for all of the different subjects to teach all of the things that your kid should know for that grade. So I just like having it on hand. So that's the first thing that I purchased and then I also purchased this set of books. The how to survive middle school and then they have each of the subjects. So we have how to survive middle school English, how to survive middle school math, how to survive middle school US history, how to survive middle school world history, and then how to survive middle school science. Now these are all approximately about 500 pages and it is what it calls a do it yourself. So for example like here's chapter one and this is the topic of chapter one and then you kind of read you know all of the different things in the chapter and then every so often there is a check your understanding of the things that you're learning um and then normally at the end of the chapter see if I can find one you have something a little bit more but it's basically meant to be a study guide. So I thought that these would make really great reference books for us to have on hand for middle school um as some of the topics get you know maybe a little beyond what Kevin and I just happen you know to know off the top of our head it would be nice to have something on hand that we could reach for to say oh you wanted to know about this well you know here's a great reference for that. So that is why I added those to our our library. Now I do already have I pulled them out to show you the big fat books for middle school. This is the complete middle school study guide and I do have these in um English, math, US history, world history, science and then computer science and steam. I didn't purchase these now I've had these for over a year and we love them for reference as well so it kind of gives us two different reference books now. So if you are only looking for one I think I prefer this series over this series but I also think that they offer a little bit of different things because this one's more like kind of a journal fill in the blank um anyway there's my opinion if you're only gonna purchase one. Okay I also wanted to do some life skills with Emily so I picked up the life skills for tweens which is supposed to help um cook, make friends, self-confidence, healthy, I'm gonna open to the table of contents for you guys just so you can see it in case you're curious. It's supposed to include everything a preteen should know to be a brilliant teenager and then to go along with that I also picked up the life skills for tweens workbook. I don't know that I'll have her do this in its entirety I just thought it would be nice to have the workbooks go along with it in case she wanted to do some of the things. Let's see I also grabbed this writing magic it is by the same author who wrote Ella Enchanted which she really enjoyed that book so I thought she would enjoy learning some writing tips from an author that she's already read books from and enjoyed um and it's just kind of a oh let's see it's kind of like each chapter tells a little bit of a story and then at the end of the chapter it's like writing time imagine a new universe think about how it can differ from our own describe inhabitants of the universe the plant life and one or more of the following an eating place a classroom a bathroom a bedroom a family vacation use this universe in a story and have fun and then make sure you save what you wrote so she kind of like gives you a little bit of background about her writing and how she does it and a few tips and then like a writing prompt but a kind of detailed one so again I thought Emily would enjoy learning from an author she's read from uh Webster's word of the day we have never really done vocabulary because we do so much reading aloud we've never needed to but I thought this would be a really fun kind of short thing just to do some extra vocabulary kind of stretch ourselves so each day of the year there are just some cute illustrations and a new word to learn I'm not sure where this is fitting in yet um probably sometime in our morning basket I would assume but we'll see I also grabbed how many guinea pigs can fit on a plane we absolutely love bedtime math and this is kind of like the next step up from bedtime math it's by the same author um let's see I will show you an example it's answers to your most clever math questions so just a little bit more advanced than the bedtime math books but still fun uh on this day in history so you would just like the word of the day open to a specific date let's see let's just pretend that today's august 20th it's not and then it would tell you multiple things that happened on that day throughout history I thought it would just kind of be a fun way again to just like oh today's august 20th let's look at the things that happened on this day in 1999 and 1922 and 2018 um and just kind of get an idea for like different things in history that maybe we haven't talked about or touched on I really also love that I think this is going to lead to rabbit trails which are some of my favorite things in homeschooling and then to go along with that I did grab school next new homeschool history timeline notebook so it is just like a timeline book of centuries and I thought it would be fun to add just our who was our what was maybe some of the things that we read on on this day in history that only thought were interesting or that appealed to her um she's really loving crash course history um video playlist so if there's something on there that she's like oh I want to add this to there or for example our history unbox subscriptions comes with stickers and it actually comes with a rollout timeline but we've been adding them to our history notebooks as well and unfortunately we had a pink one before but something got spilled on it so we bought this pretty one to start over I also grabbed these scholastic map skills for today you guys I'm going to be honest we didn't need these but they were like five dollars and I somehow got sucked in and so here we are um the ones that I purchased are grade four and grade five grade five is the highest that they go what I liked about them is that for the most part they are focused on the United States and like the directly surrounding areas so like traveling near and far uh is mostly United States but then like some Canada and Mexico and then the Americas and focus is in depth of America and I thought these would be great to add to our car school like just to kind of stick in her car school bucket for when we're traveling it would be a way to get in some geography um without having to take you know like big things with us or like my whole printed traveling the states or traveling the parks although we love those and we'll probably take specific pages but if she was curious about something that maybe I didn't bring these have a lot of different things and they're super thin like I don't even know how to explain them they're literally like 42 pages each so they would take up absolutely no room and they're colorful so I think she will really like that um for logic I grabbed a few new things logic was our one thing last year we absolutely loved it obviously I want to keep that like momentum going so I picked up Hayley Hattie's 15 minute mysteries Emily loves mysteries um case clothes like the you choose book was one of her favorite series that she's read so these are just 15 short stories for young sleuths each story is about five pages um in case you're curious the writing is even pretty big so I would say maybe even younger kids could read this um and then if they don't figure it out immediately there's also a page right behind it that kind of gives a hint and then a super hint and then it tells you where the solution can be found so I have just the 15 stories volume two 15 stories and then this one is history mysteries so I thought those would be a lot of fun I also grabbed the two truths and a lie series so this is two truths and a lie it's alive then we have two truths and a lie forces of nature this is actually the one I went looking for um specifically and then ended up getting all of them and then we have two truths and a lie history so the way these work is for example chapter one in the history one is over a thousand years ago so you have three stories a is mammoth caves mystery walker and there's like three or four pages all about that b is holy molars and then there's three or four pages about that and then c is a curse on all thieving bathers and again there's three or four pages on that now two of those three are true and one is not and so it even tells you in this chapter you write about these things um what do you think and then I'm pretty sure the answers are on the back of the book on which ones are true on which ones are not they are um but I really wanted to use these as an example for Emily because she's growing up in the digital age of the you can't always believe what you read um I mean let's be honest we all know that but I really she's at that age where she wants to believe that people wouldn't intentionally deceive you um and she wants to believe the best in people and so I thought that would be a really good way for me to start teaching her that not everything you read or hear is true and sometimes you have to think for yourself go do extra research really dig into it to figure out not only what is true and what is not but maybe what parts you believe or don't believe so that's kind of like our next level of logic that we're working towards I also grabbed a another logic um what is that called workbook for gritty kids we have not used the first one even though this one says another um because this is for eight to twelve and the other one was too young and it just looks like a fun I mean there's like all kinds of different varying logic type puzzles and just different activities for her to do so it's 200 plus activities on the cover and then also we went ahead and got the next level of mind vendors which is level five this is hands down our absolute favorite for logic we have used I think all of the levels right now she actually is not all the way done with level four but she'll finish it a couple months into sixth grade more than likely so I went ahead and picked up five this is the one that she used the most of all of the ones that I bought last year as far as the workbooks one okay let's see what's next um we're gonna start with books so the first set of books that I'm gonna show you are books that we purchased for her book club this coming year so she is going to continue doing book club on out school with Miss Mary Hannah Wilson she's actually doing two different book clubs again this year she'll be doing the eight to ten year old fiction and the 11 to 13 year old fiction um it will be her last year that she can do that because she's 11 and you can age one year down or one year up but that's the most you can do but she loved some of the books that Mary picked for the younger kids and so she just decided she wanted to do both so there is one class a month for each of those so this is the books that they will be reading in case you're wondering I will go ahead and tell you the majority of them she reads by herself the rule as far as like for me is kind of if I want to read it it's a read aloud if I don't want to really if I don't want to read it and she reads it independently there are a few in here I want to read um so a couple of them will end up being read alouds but maybe not we'll see how busy I am at that time and what else we're reading aloud so anyway for the haul we have framed which is one I want to read the mouse and the motorcycle grounded the girl who stole an elephant a knight divided sweep the story of a girl and her monster which is another one I want to read pi the very very far north I want to read this because we read the first one and I kind of want to know what happens and in significant events in the life of the cactus a rovers story the boy who harnessed the wind I want to read that one with her too the birch bark house mr. limoncello's very first game manatee summer this one is for sure going to be a read aloud because I'm excited for that one el defo and the silver arrow all right so those are the book club books now in addition to the book club books I purchased another handful of books for us to possibly read aloud for Emily to read independently um because normally she goes through the book club books in about a week so that still leaves us two weeks out of the month for reading what I did when I purchased these books is I specifically like I had a set of kind of like parameters they had to be a series of at least three books because Emily tends to want to dig deeper she tends to want to know more she absolutely loves book series like she's obsessed with them she wants to get to know the character and grow with the character and so normally when it's like a single book and there's not any follow-up she's like where's the next book and so I specifically went looking for books that I thought she would like which means they're probably mostly heavy on fantasy not all of them but more than likely because that's her choice of genre um and there's at least three books in the series maybe more than three but there is a minimum of three so I only bought the first ones because she more than likely will not love all of them but this way if she does love them I can just quickly order the second or the third and they'll be here and boom she's still reading so the first one we have is Wild Lore then we have The Serpent's Secret Never After Celia Lee Jenkins Future Author Extraordinaire Hatchet this is one I want to read so we're gonna make that a read aloud The Unwanted Dealing with Dragons The Van Gogh Deception Front Desk The City of Ember Murder is Bad Manners Ranger's Apprentice Ali Cross I think this is the one that she wants to read first because I've been reading a lot of James Patterson's books in fact I just started the Alex Cross series and this is like the kid's spinoff of it so she was like hey wait a minute that's just like yours so she was excited for that one The Conjurer's and then the Explorers Academy The Nebula Secret and this is by National Geographic so she was really excited about it too because she loves anything and everything National Geographic and then we already had one in this series um and this is like a collection of tales so I went ahead and got the other two because I knew she already liked that one and so it is The Unlikely Heroes this is 37 inspiring stories of courage and heart from the animal kingdom and then Unlikely Friendships which is 47 remarkable stories from the animal kingdom and the one we already have is The Unlikely Loves which is 43 heart warming true stories from the animal kingdom so you know anything animals she loves so she was excited that we were more in that series okay first up we have Samoku which is a math game I love that it's small and can travel with us we have Tappel basically with this one you name and like you pick a card that has a category and then you're trying to name answers and you press the letter that it starts with so it's going to be like a quick one for vocabulary um I picked up Math Attack Toe now I wish I had bought this years ago because at the moment the box is coming open but because it has three different levels the beginner level is ages eight plus the intermediate is 10 plus and the advanced is 12 plus um but basically it does addition and subtraction for beginners multiplication for intermediate and advanced mental math for the advanced ones and you can play with all of like somebody could be playing with multiple kids a beginner an intermediate and an advanced all at the same time so I wish we had bought this younger we did it so it is what it is now but we're definitely going to get our use out of it because there's not a ton of advanced math games and I was excited that I found one oh let's see American trivia spy alley the game of suspense and intrigue I told you guys Emily loves all things spy or mystery I picked up a genius star and genius square to add to our logic lineup because these two games can be played single player or two player so I love that they give us the ability for Emily to play by herself to get better at it to get familiar with it then they also give us the ability to play together and the game work just as well either way we have a few games like that but not many and so I was excited to find that these two would work like that and if you have more games that work like that let me know down in the comments because I'm always looking for good one or two player games once it would work for both oh let's see we have three clue escape games this kind of goes along with the logic Emily and Kevin also were obsessed with clue I have always wanted to do an escape room they won't do it with me so this is like a happy medium because they like clue and that's an escape thing so this is going to be family game night they just don't know it yet we have clue robbery at the museum I'm running out of table it also helped that these were on sale when I purchased them they were part of the buy to get one free um and they were like 50 percent off I think then we have clue sabotage on the high seas and clue treachery at the mansion we have mastermind we have actually been playing the mastermind kids for years and years and it works absolutely fine um Emily just said that she was ready for another level um kind of difficulty because that one you know as kitty has like little animals and stuff she loves it but she was ready to step it up a notch so I went ahead and got just the regular mastermind we also have splurt which is a quick game where you're going to name something so you get like a category for example a song title that ends in E and whoever you know can yell at first gets that card paint chip poetry I thought this would be a really fun addition to our poetry two times or anytime we're working on poetry instead of just writing it it would be a fun kind of addition extension activity um along that same alliance is metaphor dice so I thought that would be a fun way to work on figurative language and metaphors other than just trying to write them I grabbed sketch a molly which is from the same creators as creatures which is really fun uh this says draw pass laugh and repeat and it is basically each artist draws a prompt you pass your artwork and then you add hilarious elements any kind of drawing game and our family is always hilarious because Kevin is such an artist and everything he does is so detailed and Emily is really really close to that and I can't even draw a stick figure so we always like bust a gut laughing so hard so I was like yes please and I think it was less than ten dollars um I grabbed fractions wild it's a fraction based game that plays really similar to uno I thought it would just be a great way to get in some fractions math match which is a dice and card game fence it in Kevin asked for this it says grade two plus but we're just going to use it anyway Kevin actually asked for something like this um for their steam uh stem activities that they do he wanted to have a more hands-on fun way besides just like going around the house measuring things for area and perimeter and so this was kind of the answer to that because that's what it does and then he also asked for me to go ahead and get the a mathological liar grade six because they absolutely love this this is the one thing that they do every time they sit down for their steam lesson is they do at least one of these cases because they think they're amazing and then I grabbed florida opley and florida top trumps with the hope that maybe we'll get to a florida study of some kind this year um and then these two are only back to school presents this is word around the disney version see the little mickey ears we love word around and so most of these words kind of have like a disney feel to them and the cards even have some of the disney characters on them she's going to love that and then I also found a disney 100th anniversary spot it and you guys know spot it as her favorite game so she's going to be equally excited about that I grabbed brain quest grade six we will probably throw these in the car throw my purse it'll just be kind of a great way to pass them time when we need something to do okay school supplies so we have my favorite little post-it tabs this is my favorite size my favorite colors everything I can never have enough of those we also got some of the fine line sharpie markers we use these a lot for mail time because I buy blank cards more sprocket paper for our hp sprocket photo printer when it goes on sale I buy the 100 packs some of my favorite highlighters so the mild liners my absolute favorite erasable pens the friction fine liners I get a new pack every year for back to school and every year at Christmas time Kevin always buys me one because these are my favorites and I use them like crazy oh let's see I got Emily a pack of big pencils these are 0.9 millimeters so they're a little bit thicker lead this is what she started using the end of last year and she really liked them so it's a package 24 hopefully they last all school year and then some of the things I'm going to show you next are part of our nature study plan so that we kind of each have our own set of things one of those being the micron pens so one for each of us the water brushes where you put the water in the reservoir so we don't have to carry water with us so again one for each of us this is a pack of three landscape they're from Arteza books let's see it's watercolor paper and they're 8.3 by 5.1 and it was like I said a pack of three there are 76 pages in it so that will be one for each of us of those and then one for each of us of the prismacolor pencils this is the 36 pack we probably could have shared these except Kevin is kind of snobby about his art supplies so he needed his own because he doesn't want anybody touching his stuff and then um Emily tends to use everything like she'll pick up her favorite color and she uses the whole thing like down to stub or nub and I was like well then I want my own so here we are let's you don't really need one for everybody and then I also got the Windsor and Newton one for each of us little like watercolor palettes with the they're small but perfect for traveling it felt like we've had a set of these before and really like them so I went ahead and ordered another set and then luckily there's three in this pack so this is just a three pack of white gel pens so we'll each get one of those I grabbed a pack of vis-a-vis markers these are wet erase and I love using them for like things I don't want to just erase easily I need a new pack so there we go and this is in the school supply but this was like really really fun so I got it it is a puzzle a day that's like I'll see if you can see it on the back um like each day you have to put these little pieces in to show the month and the date and so every day is a different puzzle they had some wooden ones um they were a little bit bigger but I really liked the idea of the acrylic and the fact that it was different colors instead of all the same colors to make it I don't know more visually appealing I'm visual learner Emily's auditory so she probably could care less but I liked but it was pretty okay for nature study a few of the things that I picked up because that's our one thing and I wanted to make sure I had some resources on hand were the pocket full of pine cones book this is really just for me to read personally to kind of help get my mind in the right spot uh watercolor in nature keeping a nature journal how to teach nature journaling and nature drawing and journaling those two Kevin he's going to learn and then teach us and then I don't remember which ones of these we had and which ones I had to purchase I think I purchased two of these five so I'm just going to show you all of them um I picked these up to kind of keep in our nature study bag um just so we have them with us so we have the Florida wildlife and trees Florida wildflowers and trees sorry Florida wildlife Florida birds Florida reptiles and amphibians and then Florida seashore life so it is like a laminated pamphlet full of kind of just information but it felt like this was a lot less daunting and easier to carry around with us and like this you know these big books and so this is what we have plus since they're laminated that means they're waterproof so we don't have to worry about you know if we're like have it spread out and we're water coloring and water gets on it it's not a big deal because they're waterproof and then last I just have a few like hands-on things so some of these things Kevin asked for it for steam Emily was showing interest in DNA so he asked for some sort of DNA kit to do with her so we got the genetics and DNA lab for him tans and cosmos and then they love doing lego so I picked up the clutch lego gadgets this is one of the few that they don't have yet and the next two things I'm going to show you were technically Emily's birthday presents but they're going to be used as steam as well with the two of them so here they are these were these were birthday just so you know not like this is the three and one medieval castle from lego and then we also have the three and one pirate ship from lego so like I said those were birthday gifts but they're technically going to be part of our homeschool and we did get them from amazon so that is it I think yep that's it that's everything that is everything that I purchased from amazon for the upcoming homeschool year I would absolutely love it if you would leave me a comment down below what you have purchased for your homeschool year