 Hey everybody, welcome to the Lotak Way. I'm Jessica and today's video is going to be our homeschool favorites from the 2022-2023 homeschool year. In years past, I have really, really tried to share our favorites seasonally because I feel like every season has its own favorites, but this year that totally got away from me. So I thought we would just do a wrap up this year of all of our favorite things. Now, that being said, most of the things that I'm showing you are new favorites. So I will link past favorites up here for you to check out because I really tried not to have any repeats. So that doesn't mean that old favorites aren't still favorites or that we don't still love them. Just means these are things that really, really stood out in our homeschool this year that maybe you haven't seen yet or maybe you've seen them but not in a favorites video, hopefully. This past year are one thing that I really wanted to focus on was logic and critical thinking. So I thought I would start there and show you our favorite things that really stood out from that category. The first one is the mind vendors. We really, really love these. She, this was the one of all of the logic books that I got that she begged for. So this was definitely a favorite. And then the few games, The Sherlock Express, I loved that this could be played one single player, like she could kind of practice to get better at it and we could play it together. And it's really, really quick. Like it literally played in less than 10 minutes. Sorry, this has a bell in it. So I'm trying not to be loud. The match puzzle game, this one too, can be played one player so that she can get better at it and kind of practice. Or we could play it, actually it goes up to four players so we could play it just me and her or as a family. And it really, really worked on her logic. It also worked on her graceful losing skills because she wasn't great at it in the beginning. And I would beat her almost every time because I don't slow myself down or let her win. And so she would get really frustrated. We kept pushing through and the first time she beat me was like a huge deal and now she can regularly beat me. So this one was definitely when it also has a bell, you can hear it in there. And I don't know about your kids but Emily loves anything that she gets to ring a bell and be ridiculously loud. The other winner, which I actually did not buy this with the intention of it being for logic but it ended up being perfect for it. And that is Hive. I actually bought it for our mini beast unit study for us to do, you know, bugs. It is essentially a version of chess because each of the bugs has a different way that they can move and they can only move in that way but it's free flowing because you don't have a board. So it's ever changing. So in my opinion, it kind of takes chess to a next level. It's really, really fun. We played it a ton. Like it definitely became a favorite of ours. It's a two-player game like chess and I find that sometimes it can be hard to find two-player games like good two-player games. And this one, hands down, was a great one. Since we are already talking about games, let's go ahead and get some of our favorite games out of the way. A little wordy became a huge favorite this year. This is a two-player game. Essentially you both pick some letters out of a bag, some vowels and consonants. You come up with a secret word based off of those letters and then you're trying to guess each other's word but you get like these little cards that you can buy and you buy a vowel or you get to find out the last letter but everyone has a different cost. So it's kind of like a wheel of fortune but just trying to figure out a single word and you're playing head to head. We played this a ton. I absolutely love it. There were times when she would get kind of frustrated because I would beat her quite a bit at first that I would play against her and Kevin as a team to make it a little more fair but we only did that in the beginning and then she can hands down hold her own now but if you're playing with a younger kid that might be a way to even the playing field a little bit is let them play on a team with somebody or let somebody help them. Another one of our favorites was Outnumbered. This is a really, really fun math game with a superhero twist. Absolutely love that. And then we really, first of all we're a trivia loving family so know that when I show you these but we really loved and played these a ton. These are the games that I got from Mindware. I believe Amazon carries them to you but it's the Animal Trivia Challenge, the Geography Trivia Challenge and the Science Trivia Challenge. They gameplay themselves is all pretty similar. You're moving around a board, you're answering different questions. But I really like the way it's done. They were fun. We enjoyed them. The questions were good. The topics were good. It's colorful. These got a ton of gameplay in our house. Like I said, we love trivia though so know that going in. But I also love that I could basically just pull one of these off the shelf and call Science or Geography done for the day. Okay, books. If you missed the book video that I posted last week, I will put it up here. I showed all of the books that we read in fifth grade with ratings from Emily. These are like the favorites though in case you don't wanna watch the whole video. Otter, this as a book wrote in poetic form. It was very fun and interesting. The entire Percy Jackson series. We absolutely loved Willow Dean. I did not read this one but Emily has raved about it. It was her absolute favorite, The Inquisitor's Tale. And then again, Emily absolutely loved these and it is Amari and the Night Brothers and Amari and the Great Game. She's hoping they come out with a third one really, really soon because she enjoyed them so much. All right, since we just showed books, I'm gonna go ahead and jump into some of my teacher favorites. One of which is a book, this homeschool book Teach by Dennis DeNoah, which is Mr. D for Mr. D Math. I really, really liked it because it's about creating independent responsible learners. So I felt like it was kind of the right time for me to read it as Emily is becoming a little more independent and needs a little more responsibility but it was a really good homeschool read. Quick read, loved it. It's one I will probably reread a lot. I tend to do that with homeschool books. I like reading them over the summer to kind of prep me for the coming year. Okay, the rest of my teacher favorites are gonna be Teacher E. The Mild Line Highliners. Okay, so you guys know that I love, love friction and I love their fine line pens. Like they've probably been a favorite a hundred times. They're my favorite, hands down. I don't love their highlighters even though they're kind of mild because first of all they don't erase well. It ruins the words under it. And they're just not like smooth. Like I want it to be smooth when I highlight but I don't like bam in your face highlighters. Like I don't wanna open it up and be blinded. I love these, love them. They are light. They are, here I'll show you. The gray is my favorite, like I love the gray. Let's see here. I will highlight a few things for you guys so you can see it. But they're just like they're smooth and they're mild. They're not like all in your face bam but you can still tell you highlighted something. And they also have a fine tip on the other end. I don't hardly ever use the fine tip but it's nice to know it's there if I wanted to. Those are one of my teacher favorite. My other teacher favorite are the Post-it Flags but specifically this size. I had the bigger ones, didn't love them. This size is my favorite. I like these and only these and I use them for everything. To mark my planner pages for bookmarks. We use them to mark where we're at and curriculum we use them for everything. And then this was kind of like a teacher slash homeschool tool favorite. It is a cube timer. I actually have one that I was using for work. When you buy them they have different pre-set times on them so look to make sure you get the one that's gonna work best for you. This one has five, 15, 30 and 60. What I love is if it's sitting like this nothing's happening. The minute you take one of the times and you flip it to the top it automatically starts counting down from that time. Like that's, so if I say do this like just do your math for 15 minutes we could just do that and then it would deem when it goes off. She actually has a set on low. I have all mine set on high. What I would do when I would work is I would set a 30 minute timer and I would work for 30 minutes and then I would flip it to five and I would like walk around the house for five minutes. It would help me get my steps in every day especially when I'm very, very stationary for working. And I do something similar when Emily's doing a lot of screen time. I'll be like, okay you can have 30 minutes of screen time and then get up and move for five minutes. I don't really limit her screen time. I just ask that every 30 minutes she rests her eyes and moves her body. So, but it's been perfect because you don't have to try to set a timer. You're not fooling with something. I'm not getting my phone to set a timer because then that's like a whole nother issue and I'm diving down a rabbit trail that I don't need to be on. So, I love that timer. It's tech-free. It's perfect. Okay, our favorite unit study from the year was Greek Heroes and Myths. Not that we didn't love the other unit studies we did. We absolutely adored this. The Percy Jackson books were our favorite. Greek mythology was such a fun topic. It was just absolutely amazing. Our whole family got involved which leads me to our favorite field trip of the year which was going to Nashville to see the replica of the Parthenon. It was not, it's crazy because it probably wasn't even our fanciest field trip and it was one that was like a detour because we were already in Tennessee but it went with our unit study so well and it was really cool to see it like brought to life and also to see it in its entirety because if you were to go see the actual Parthenon obviously it's not perfect like this one is but like to stand there and see Athena like you think you realize how big she is but no, you really don't until you're standing at her feet. It was just really, really awesome experience especially having learned about them with that unit study. Okay, we are almost done. One of the favorite steam things that Emily and Kevin did over the year was this brick structures but of course it was a favorite because it literally combines two of their favorite things. It's like Lego meets Snap Circuit which are two independently favorites. So this one hands down was a favorite. They did a lot of the projects and we'll probably redo them all again because they loved it so much. And then subscription boxes. Again, this doesn't mean that others aren't our favorite. It's just, I was trying to show you guys new ones. One that has become a favorite, Quick has been Crunch Labs. I'm sorry, I'm covering our address. It hands down as the one they look to look forward to the most when it comes in now they love this. It is such a fun, unique experience because they're engineering things that you've never done before. For example, sometimes when you get like Tinker physics boxes there's certain things that they've done multiple times because different companies have done similar things like just this, I don't know, the standard simple machines or the standard things that you do when you're doing physics. None of that happens with Crunch Lab. Like it's so unique. It's such a unique experience that they really, really enjoy it. The other one we really enjoyed this year that kind of surprised me was the history boxes. It really just makes it easy. It's got everything you need. It's super simple. It's a fun way to learn history. It brings it to life, which just makes it so much easier for me, especially if I'm doing a study anyway. For example, we were already doing Greek Heroes and Myths. So there was some Greek boxes that went along with that and it was like, perfect. Oh, this is great. It's done. Let's just do this. So if you are studying a certain time period, like if you're doing ancients or medievals or American history, their boxes are amazing because it's basically ready-made projects for you. And also they have some age ranges when you subscribe so you can get like five to nine or teens or even adults, which makes it great because that means that you can tailor it to your kids' ages. So that's it. Those are our top favorites from the 2022-2023 homeschool year, which for all intents and purposes was in my fifth grade year in case you are curious. Now, I would absolutely love it if you would leave me your favorites from this past homeschool year in the comments so that I could check them out.