 Hi everyone, welcome to our episode of STEM Chat. Today, Diane and I are going to share some of our favorite things from this year that are perfect for your holiday gift list. So we're going to start with the do-it-yourself rocket kit. We just launched it and we actually lost our rocket but it was kind of fun and we have big claims to buy a new one soon. Very cool. And as you know, Diane and I love nature and flowers and when I was in Paris last year, I got to visit this wonderful paper store called Iline Clam and there's a whole crepe paper flower kit in here. It's available for those of you in Europe. And if you remember from our holiday video last year, I used this crepe paper flower kit, I'm sorry, this crepe paper flower book and we made crepe paper flowers for our Christmas tree. So you can also have this as another option. Okay, so as Diana showed you with the crepe paper one, there's also really cool die-cut kits with Leah Griffith and this is sold on Amazon. It's very affordable, it's under $10 and all these, you can make these beautiful Camilla flowers with already pre-cut die-cut paper and this is so great. It makes all the flowers shown here and there's also a video where she shows you how to make it. All you need to get is the floral tape and the extra things to make the leaves but this is, well she has leaves here but the floral tape and the actual wire to make these. So it's really fun, I don't know, I love making flowers in this way. The other thing you can do, take an extra step further is to get a cutting machine. I have a silhouette and Diana has a Cricut machine and we've both used these for birthday parties and everything else I make on my silhouette stickers for my planner and it's already pre-cut on this thing and Diana what do you use yours for? I mostly use mine to make vinyl stickers of children's names for party favors at birthday parties. It's a super cool thing, I think it's a great gift for any crafter on your list. Okay, so robots, I mean what kids don't like robots, one of a great gift are these robots called Dot and Dash and they work with an app. These two actually can communicate together. Diana got it for her older daughter last year for Christmas and so I would say this is a great gift, it lasts for years. There's an actual app that you can use to program it and there's lots of cool accessories. There's a whole online community, there's been like challenges that kids can do. This one is a dot, she doesn't move but the two robots can actually communicate together and do things together and so when your kids discover the whole personality of them and make fun little apps and it's really engaging and what it does is it basically teaches kids coding skills so there's a technology and coding element in this and it's very very fun. And they're also kind of like a little pet too, I feel like. They are like a little pet because they have a little personality and there's just fun accessories for it so I definitely think it's worthwhile. And while we're talking about robots, we really love these snap-together robot kits from Elinko. We have gone through a whole bunch of them and my kids have done Zoom build-alongs. This one's really cool because it follows you around or it kind of like walks around on its own and explore mode. Then here's the bug bot, which is like a great starter one. I love it because the pieces come, they're like plastic and you just punch them out and then you snap them together. It doesn't take any glue, which a lot of model kits do need and sometimes you screw little parts together too. And here's a look at the bug bot over here. Oh that's adorable. I love it. Okay and if you're doing a lot of things with your hands and Zoom videos where you have to show your fingers, Natalie and I really love the Dior cuticle cream. It really smooths your fingers out and especially with all the hand sanitizer we're using now helps if you have dry skin. And if you order it from Dior, it comes in a cute little package that you can give as a gift. Yeah this is great for anyone who really works their hands and Diana had told me this for a while now. It took me over a year to finally give in and get it so it's really worth it because it actually really does work. And so I used to have really dry cuticles and it was just peeling on my fingers. It didn't look well so she really helped me out with that tip. So it's something we hope we can share with everyone. It's a miracle. Yeah right before we started filming. Exactly. Okay so we all know there are lots of chemistry kits out there and I really love Yellow Scope Chemistry Kits. This is the foundation chemistry set and you can see it's a company created by women and they actually have women scientists on the booklets and the packaging to really empower young girls. Everything you need is included in the kit. So there are tablets, the beakers, all the supplies and my daughter and our neighbor friend loved it so much. They decorated the box themselves. They made it their own. I would say they used this box even after they used up all the chemistry projects themselves and created their own experiments and had a little notebook and so they actually created their own little chemistry club together writing notes together. So I love that how the sense of like storytelling and chemistry kind of came together in their interactive play. That's so neat. Does it come with chemicals in it or is it like you stuff from your kitchen? It comes with everything you need. It actually has specific experiments you can go through and so it has everything you need to do and you just need to add like water. Oh wow that's really cool. There may be specific other kits that may need other things. I'm not too sure right now. It's been a few years but I would say this kit because I've tried other chemistry kits and this one they really loved and so there was something about the way the whole thing is packaged and the way the experiments are created that it really made them kind of use your imagination to create more experience even on their own. Oh that's neat. I like that it has you know you're kind of going towards the more serious chemicals with it. We've been using this kind of like a children's chemistry set at home and it's with chemicals from your kitchen like lemon juice and stuff. I love that the pieces are these sort of like large plastic pieces and you put them in your dishwasher so that's really great. They're very durable. My daughter had that when she was younger and her toddler early elementary days and that was just a great kit. Very useful super durable. Very good. We also have this tiny chemistry set, tiny science and it has so cute things, tiny beaker. I love miniatures. Oh my god it's adorable. Yeah I kids like to play with it with their Barbies and dinos together when they set up like play chemistry lab. That is adorable. I love how cute and realistic the dinosaurs were in that photo we just showed. Oh thanks. They're from this German company called Schleich and we have a whole collection of them. They're nice because I feel like they're fairly realistic. There's actually worms all about them every time they release a new model and they talk about how accurate they are like is the like how long the front and back legs are and if they're in a realistic pose so they're really neat. And some of them are really good size for like stocking stuffers. Oh yeah that's right. Yeah we also have these other things. We really love these acrylic housed beetles that would make great stocking stuff. Yeah we drew them in our bug episode. That's one of my favorite episodes we did. Yeah very durable too and you can look at them with the pocket microscope. And speaking of beetles we love this Christopher Marley book about bugs. It's kind of like all the beautiful things about bugs that make you love bugs even if you thought that they were icky originally. Right. And all these books we have in our STEM summer reading list from the summer and it's in a newsletter. You can look at them. Their books are great gifts to have to give year round. So that's you can check out the list for all the rest of the books we love. So speaking of books again here's a new book I just added to our collection. It's from DK Smithsonian STEM Lab and it covers all kinds of really cool STEM projects for kids. Full color photos. It's very compelling and it really shows all the ingredients and all the projects kids can make. So I really love this book. It's another book I want to add to our wonderful favorite things list. Okay and if you like crafting at home we've been really into our knitting machine. This is a circular knitting machine and we've been making a lot of fun things. We made this pumpkin for I don't know like Halloween and fall. Oops. It's very cute. Here we go. How long it took you to make this pumpkin? I don't know about like maybe 30 minutes or an hour. And then we made these like little ghosts. These were very fast. These only took like 20 minutes to make. And this is what's going in the dark yarn. And then here is a leg warmer. We're trying out. We didn't like the leg warmer enough to make a second one. So it's a single leg warmer. But you can make lots of fun things and if you're looking for a cute yarn. I really like the hand dyed yarn from the Brooklyn company called Wandering Flock. Oh those are really pretty colors. Thanks. I love that. And that speaking of knitting, you need to get a nice kind of craft bag or tote bag this Erin Condren small tote is perfect because there's pockets. You can put your craft projects in here. There's lots of zippers. You can also change out the strap. Oh, wow. But I just love it. You can put your tools in here. I think it's really handy when you need to have your knitting project on the go or your quick little hand sewing project. I really love it. It's really durable canvas material in here. I like it because it stands up. It looks like it stands up on its own. I feel like my head is over vegan leather bottom. So actually, it does stand up really well. That's great. I like it. I kind of want to get one. Okay. And if you're looking for something to organ get your kids organized. You remember these pencil boxes that you have one Natalie with all the cool little I remember those I totally I think. Yeah. So this one is my older daughters. It's a little bit more traditional kind of like the ones we used to have but then they have this type which is my younger daughters and it has some crazy things that pop up there's the pencil sharpener. Let's see this one has scissors over here. Let's see what's over here is some tape and over there's the eraser and extra little pouch and pencils. I'm so cute. I'm obsessed with Japanese stationery. Well, any stationary in general. Another cool stationary thing I love are these archer and olive acrylic graph pens. It comes in this wonderful sets. This is the primary colors. And they're really they're kind of like paint pens for non toxic and then you can actually activate the pens here. Try out the palettes and they work really well and like bullet journals. You know, sketchbook paper. This is a my daughter's Amanda Richley bullet journal, dark red paper. But we also have what's really cool is you can use it on like blackout journals. The arch and olive sells these blackout paper journals and you can actually draw on them and the colors are just so vibrant on black paper. It's really it's really fun. That's really neat. Okay, so that's it for favorite things from this year. We hope you guys have a safe and happy holiday season. We'll have all the products mentioned in this video and links listed below on the description box as well as in our next newsletter. So sign up for our email newsletter at stemjackclub.com. Thank you so much. Happy holidays.