 Hey everybody, welcome to the Wallach Way. I'm Jessica, and today's video is going to be our top pool school resources. Now you might be thinking, what in the heck is pool school? Well, let me tell you, we live in Florida and it gets ridiculously hot here in the summers. So if we're gonna be outdoors at all, there's got to be water involved. So we spend probably two thirds of our awake time in our outdoor time in the pool in the backyard. So I decided last summer to challenge myself to see if I could teach an entire homeschool day in the pool. Now, do you have to do this? Absolutely not. It is 100% okay to just enjoy time in the pool, which we do. Do not think that when I show you all of this, we are constantly doing something in the pool. We do a lot of stuff in the pool, but there is still plenty of time for us to just chillax and enjoy being a family. But we like to learn, we live a learning lifestyle. And so I wanted to challenge myself to come up with ways to learn multiple different things while we were still chilling out in the pool and cooling down. And so I'm gonna share our top resources with you today for that. The first thing that I have is probably like the staple for our pool schooling. And it is a floating table. It's really big, I'm gonna try to get on camera. It is the same material as like a pool noodle, but it is two foot by two foot. It has cup holders in the corners. It has like this little rim. We can actually stand cards up there. And it's pretty thick. You can actually like jump in the pool and it will still float even with waves. We've never had an issue with it. We use it for playing games on. We use it for food and snacks. We use it for everything. Like I actually thought we had lost it at the beginning of this season. When we were pulling all of our pool stuff out, I couldn't find it. And I was like, oh my gosh, I immediately was adding another one to our Amazon cart because I'm like, we can't go all summer without it because we're kind of spoiled. Now we're very, very used to it and we love it. Luckily, we found ours. So I didn't have to order another one. In addition to that, we have this really fun activity called Spell and Dive. And so it is these letters that are weighted so they sink to the bottom of the pool. And then with it, you get these waterproof cards. They're, I guess kind of a vinyl material. And they have different words on them. That one's really hard to see, but it says zebra. And they're double-sided. So there's a ton of different words. And you can have your kids just dive down and get the letters and match them up to spell the different words if they're younger. So they can practice spelling in a way without needing you a ton. Like you can just easily be like, okay, here, just go in. You can use a shallow pool if your kids can't dive yet. Just have them reach in and get the letter and do it. That's still a really fun way to get some water play in this summer. I like to do a lot of different things. We will throw all the letters in and I will sometimes just use these. I'll put these on the floating table and I'll be like, okay, let's see how many you can do in a minute and I'll time her. Sometimes I like to throw them all in and have her collect the letters in alphabetical order. Sometimes I throw them all in and I will just randomly tell her a word and say, okay, get the letters to spell Emily, which obviously she can spell her name. But just whatever letter or whatever word I can come up with. We like to play in a lot of different ways. Sometimes we'll race. Sometimes I'll have her collect them by color because there's multiple different colors of the letters as well. There's green, blue, yellow and red. So that's another one. If you had young kids, you could just have them like by color, tell you the letters, the sound. There's so many different ways that you could utilize this set, especially if you have kids of varying ages in some sort of water activity because that is super waterproof and everything about that is actually meant to be in the pool. Okay, so next we have waterproof games. Now these games are specifically meant for and marketed for water, wet, hands, pool, whatever you wanna say. This is Uno Splash. It comes with this little key chain ring. These are almost like a piece of laminate. So they're absolutely fine. So we play Uno in the pool a lot. Then we have Spotted Waterproof. Spotted is one of our favorite games. It comes in this little net bag so you don't have to worry about the packaging getting wet. And then these cards are that same kind of vinyl as the spelling cards. So you can play this in the pool as well. And what I love about Spotted, it's one of the things I've loved about Spotted since Emily was really, really little is that there's no reading involved. So it's just matching pictures. So even kids who don't know how to read yet can still play and enjoy that. And then we have a deck of waterproof, just regular playing cards. So we play a lot of different games in the pool with this. One of the ones that we played a lot last summer, and we'll probably have played a lot again this summer, is Multiplication War. So we would each flip two cards. So for instance, six and four, you would multiply them and then whoever had the higher product got to win them. We play Go Fish, Crazy Eight. Kevin has even played Solitaire because the floating table is big enough that he can easily lay all the cards on and play Solitaire. Emily's played Solitaire if nobody else is in the mood to play something. So there's a ton of different, like, because any card game you can think of, you can play in the pool with those unless you have to keep score, then it can get a little tricky. So those are the waterproof, like actually meant to be in the water. These are great even if you don't have a pool to throw in a beach bag because you could play them at the beach and you don't have to worry about them getting wet or messed up. So those are great for that. The next set of games that I have are not marketed as waterproof or water games. However, we use them in the pool anyway because the majority of the materials are okay if they get wet. So I'm gonna share them with you because we love using them for the pool, but just know that they're not like technically waterproof games. So the first one that I have is the Math Dice Junior by ThinkFun. This is just like a little, I don't even know what to call this material, but it's like a little bag. The bag is fine if it gets wet. It's gotten wet before for us. The dice are all fine if they get wet. They have like these big chunky dice. And then this little game board is also fine if it gets wet. The only problem with Math Dice Junior is the little pawn pieces that you give you are like a thick cardboard. If it gets wet, that becomes a problem. So we stole little plastic ponds from another game to put in our bag. And these are what we use when we're playing in the pool. They're just little plastic, like little meeple ponds or whatever, not meeples, but little pawn people. And then it has no problem. That can all go in the bag. And now everything about this is fine if it gets wet. I wouldn't necessarily call it a waterproof game, but we played in the pool all summer, last summer, all year last summer and had no problems with it getting wet. Now, keeping a score can be a little difficult. So with that one, whoever finishes, finishes as the winner. With a few others, I'll tell you how we play those. The other Think Fun Dice game, just Math Dice, if you're playing the actual Math Dice, not Math Dice Junior, it's just dice. So it's three, six-sided dice and two, 12-sided dice. Those as well as the bag can all get wet with no problem. Take your directions out though, because the directions are paper, you probably don't want those to get wet. So we take those out and leave those in the house, but everything else in both of the bags are fine. Next, we have the Roll a Story, exact same bag material as the Think Fun Math Dice. So it's absolutely fine. We take the directions out and then you just have a very big handful of story dice that have little pictures on them. And so we play these multiple different ways. We will each roll a dice and tell a story and each person who rolls the dice will add onto the story with the next dice that they roll. We will roll all of the dice and try to tell a story and we will challenge ourselves to include as many dice as possible in our story and then whoever can use the most dice in the story is the winner. Sometimes we will have a category, like, okay, we're gonna tell a mystery and we will all take turns telling mysteries using the dice. It's just a really great way to get in some literacy and creative storytelling. And so we love using those during our pool time. Another game that we really like is Word Shout. This one's tiny, so it's perfect to throw in a pool or a beach bag because it takes up no room. And again, if you just take the directions out and kind of set them to the side, maybe if you need the directions, just take a picture with your phone so that you have them with you, but they're not gonna get wet and get ruined. And then inside this is just some dice. So again, nothing that can't get wet. And we don't keep score because you can't really write if your hands are wet. So we will just do kind of like by the round who wins and then however many people will win that round. So we roll all the dice and we race to see how many words each person can come up with. Whoever comes up with the most words based off of the dice that are rolled is the winner of that round. And then we just keep playing like that. Whoever wins the most rounds is the overall winner and we play however many rounds we feel like at that time. All right, we have two more games that again are not technically waterproof. One is banana grams. Now we don't keep the banana grams in here. If we're going to take them into the pool, we just keep them in as a block bag because then we don't have to worry about anything. I'm not saying that these canvas bags aren't waterproof but we just haven't chanced it. So we leave the directions in the bag at the house and then we just take the plastic bag with the banana gram tiles out because the tiles themselves are fine if they get wet. They have survived an entire summer with absolutely no problem. So we play banana grams on the floating table because it is, like I said, it's two foot by two foot. So it's very, very big. It gives us plenty of room to be able to play banana grams. And then we do the same with the Moby kids and the Moby. So if he's a whale, just like the banana grams but with number tiles, we keep them in a plastic bag and the tiles themselves are like plastic. The Moby kids, which is what I happen to have in my hand is just addition and subtraction. If you get the darker blue kind of full version of Moby then it's multiplication and division as well. So again, we leave the whale with the directions in the house and we just take the Ziploc bag or the plastic bag or a silicone bag, something that can get wet with all the tiles in it and we use our floating table to play that on. So that is all of our pool school games that we kind of keep in a bag for us to take out when we're gonna want to play a game in the pool. Next up, we have a waterproof speaker. This is my personal favorite because when I say waterproof, I actually, it means it. It actually has like the little things that cover all of the outlets so you don't have to worry about it. I love having the waterproof speaker because we can listen to audio books. We can listen to music. We have a lot of music on our playlist that are like multiplication tables or geography songs. So we can listen to all that on the speaker with absolutely no problem. And then in addition to that are our Kindle Paper Whites because all of our Kindle Paper Whites are waterproof. They can literally, I haven't physically, well actually I have, that's a lie. I have dropped mine. I mean, not like all the way to the bottom of the pool but I have definitely gotten it wet and it's fine. Me and Emily both have one so sometimes I will read aloud from mine or sometimes she will read to herself or just both read our books. You know, as we're floating in the pool just kind of depends on what our moods are but I will say as far as pool schooling goes these and the floating table, obviously I like all the games but the floating table and the Kindles are like hands down my favorite things the ones we use the most because we can read, we can play whatever even if all you had was like the single deck of cards you could still do so much with it. And then recently the last thing which is I cannot wait to use it so much this summer is Kevin actually just recently put up an outdoor TV near our pool and so we can watch documentaries while we're floating in the pool or have movie nights. I'm actually literally as I am filming this it is let me check 10,09 at night and Emily and Kevin are in the pool floating watching a movie as we speak and I'm gonna end this video so that I can go join them and enjoy some pool school at 10 o'clock at night. So that is all of our top pool school resources. I would love it now if you would give me any ideas you might have for how to do some learning while you're in the pool. I did have somebody tell me that they used to practice states and capitals when they would jump off of like the ladder or the deck they would call out a state and the kid would have to call out the correct capital before they jumped in. So I thought that was really fun. We might utilize that for a ton of different things like math facts or anything else I can think of parts of speech, states and capitals. So if you have any other ideas please leave them in the comments because I would love to add more to our pool schooling time together.