Archives for November 2014

Quooz Diffuser Review

November 14, 2014 by Becca Leave a Comment

I love using diffusers in our home to disperse the essential oils that we use. I was perusing Amazon for diffusers, because I love gadgets, and I came upon the Quooz Diffuser. It immediately caught my eye, because it’s so neat looking! It has a lot of great features as well.

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It’ll hold 200ml of water, so it’ll run for quite a while. I’ve let mine run straight a few times without shutting it off, and it went about 5 hours. Pretty impressive in my opinion. There’s also a soothing light that you can choose while diffusing, but it doesn’t automatically come on, there is a separate button for it. The light has different settings. You can either let it back and forth between bright and dim (it’s gradual), or when it gets to your desired brightness, you push the light button again and it’ll stay that brightness until it either runs out of water and shuts off, or you turn it off.
Normally, it’s not recommended that you diffuse essential oils more than 30 minutes to an hour at a time, but you could certainly leave the water plain and use this as a small area humidifier. I love this diffuser, because of its high capacity, and its sleek looks. It does a wonderful job of diffusing oils and is really a great value. If you’re an oil user, you should definitely try this diffuser!

Out of the Box Games ~ A Schoolhouse Crew Review

November 14, 2014 by Becca Leave a Comment

Out of the Box Games Review

Our family absolutely loves to play games together around the table. Since we moved and have had room for a dining table, it’s been put to good use. I especially love when I can incorporate a game into our school day, and it’s even better to find a game that everyone enjoys. We were give the opportunity to review a new-to-us game from Out of the Box Games, called Snake Oil. Snake Oil is recommended for ages 10 and up, and at the time of posting, the retails price is $19.99. Out of the Box Games has been providing a variety of games to people that are fun, engaging, and easy to learn since 1998. There are lots of sweet games listed on their website.

Out of the Box Games Review
What do you think of when you hear the phrase “snake oil”? I always think of the old Western shows that I’ve seen that show people on wagons who travel around trying to sell their “magical” cure-all to folks wherever they go. Of course, there’s no magic or cure to it. The crooks had to be smart and sneaky and really think of how they could sell their phony products to the poor saps who would eventually fall for their deception. Of course, by the time the people realized that they were swindled, it was too late, and the “snake oil” salesmen were well on their way. Did you know, though, that snake oil really did exist, though? In the 1860s, it was introduced in the US by Chinese laborers who were working on the railroad at the time. They used it as an ointment for sore muscles.

That’s sort of the premise behind this game, Snake Oil. Your goal is to sell something that’s probably useless to someone, by pitching it to your customer. In the box are 336 Word Cards and 28 double-sided Customer Cards. You need at least 3 players, and can have up to 10. Each player draws 6 Word Cards, and a player is selected to be the first Customer. All of the other players then decide on which 2 of their Word Cards they will combine to make a product that they will then pitch to the Customer. The Customer can cut off a pitch that goes on for more than 30 seconds if they wish. After everyone has pitched their product, the Customer choose which product was their favorite, then hands their Customer Card to the person they chose. The Word Cards that are used are discarded after each round, and new ones drawn. After everyone has been the Customer one time, the game is over, and whoever has won the most Customer Cards wins! It’s really a very simple game, and it gets everyone’s creative juices flowing. My poor mama brain can really use some help in that area, let me tell ya!
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The kids and I had SO MUCH fun with this game. We’ve never played a game before that had us rolling like Snake Oil does. As soon as the game came in the mail and the kids saw the box, they were so excited and asked to play right away, even though they didn’t know what it was. We have played this game so many times, and it never gets old. We love it so much. Sometimes we play after school is over, sometimes we play it for the purpose of school during the day. You just never know when someone’s gonna bring the game to the table, and everyone rushes to play! Lucas is 6, and it’s hard for him to play since he doesn’t read yet, so it’s usually just me and the 3 oldest kiddos playing. One thing I want to mention, is 2 of the cards have somewhat unusual words for what I would consider a family game: Bra and Hell. While I realize these aren’t really bad words, I definitely wasn’t expecting to see them on any of the cards. Of course the boys giggle like schoolgirls when one of them gets the Bra Word Card, and no one uses Hell at all. In fact, I’ll probably just pull those 2 cards out and discard them. I’m not a prude or anything, they just don’t work for our family. Otherwise, the game is a HUGE hit here, and you need to get it!
You can follow along with Out of the Box Games on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

Be sure to click the banner below to read reviews from my fellow Crew Mates. Some received a different version of Snake Oil, so be sure to check it out. Thanks for stopping by!

Little Passports Announces Early Explorers Subscription for Preschoolers

November 13, 2014 by Becca Leave a Comment

Little Passports has a wonderful new program for preschoolers, called Early Explorers. Children ages 3 to 5 can experience the joy of learning about new cultures.

Each month, your child will be introduced to a new theme like animals, music, and landmarks. Early Explorers is designed with preschoolers in mind and provides fun and educational activities, souvenirs and stickers. During the first month, a Traveler’s Kit arrives in a fun orange suitcase. It holds everything a child needs to start learning about the world:

An activity book introducing new characters Max, Mia, and their dog Toby.
A wall-sized world map
Stickers and a wall decal
A luggage tag

After the first month, a monthly World Theme Kit arrives, which contains:

An activity booklet
Souvenirs
Flashlight Adventures
Stickers and wall decals

Early Explorers makes a unique holiday gift for children ages 3 to 5. Learn more about Early Explorers from Little Passports. We love our Little Passports, so if you have a preschooler, be sure to check the new kit out!

Purposeful Design ~ A Schoolhouse Crew Review

November 12, 2014 by Becca Leave a Comment

As I said a few weeks ago, I’m sort of building my book collection back up since we’ve moved. When I find a new book that fits in with our family, especially when I can use it during school, I jump at the chance to get it. This is the case with the book we received from Purposeful Design. The book is called Purposeful Design: Understanding the Creation, written by Jay Schabaker. At the time of posting, the cost is $18.95. It’s age appropriate for everyone, so I knew it’d be a great fit for us! There’s also a free downloadable workbook available that corresponds with the book, Young Explorer’s Club, along with a teacher answer key. This is just a little something extra, not something you have to use. It’s better geared towards kids who are already decent readers, or could be used in a group setting.

Purposeful Design Review

I’m just gonna say it now. I love this book. It’s just really cool! It’s not a large book in terms of length at 91 pages. There are 7 chapters, 1 for each day of creation, and one for resting. That’s what the book is about. I know there are all sorts of books out there talking about God’s creation, but this one is just different, and awesome. While it’s a book that is about God’s creation of the world, it also shows the scientific side of creation from a Christian standpoint.

Chapter 1 discusses the first day of creation, and then goes into detail about what keeps the solar system going; what makes everything work the way that it does, and how God created everything to work in harmony.
Chapter 2, Creation of the Atmosphere and Water, details the rain cycle. Although Issac is a bit of a weather buff and knew a little of this already, the kids really enjoyed reading/learning about it.
Chapter 3, Creation of Dry Land and Vegetation, talks about the importance of plants to humans. Plants have so many uses; for food, medicine, making every day necessities. So many more uses than these even!
Chapter 4, Creation of the Sun, Moon, and Stars; this chapter covers the Earth’s tilt, the benefits of ocean tides and the moon, the sunrise’s preciseness, and yes, even stars have a purpose!
Chapter 5, Creation of Birds and Fish, discusses why they were created, their instincts, and even why ice floats! (it’s really neat, and the reason is something I would have never thought about!)
Chapter 6, Creation of Land Creatures and Humans, covers the uniqueness of humans, and God’s creation of domestic animals for us, and some of their uses. The chapter covers blood clotting, cells, the brain and skull, eyes, nose, mouth, and ears. One thing I must mention that just tickled me to death, is the fact that breastfeeding is mentioned, and there’s even a picture of a mom nursing her baby.(don’t worry it’s “safe” for kids) I loved this! I love that Jay even thought to bring it up. Kudos to you, Jay!
Chapter 7 is more about the 4th Commandment: Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. God rested on the 7th day, and we should also remember to rest.

I know I already said that I love this book, but I have to say it again. I love it! It covers a lot of ground, but it’s good information and not a lot of fluff. We see what a loving god our God is, and how much thought and effort he put into everything he made for us. Can you imagine someone loving you so much, that they made a whole world for you, and made it work perfectly? How awesome!

This book was so easy to work into our Group Time around the table. The chapters aren’t very long, and we could usually finish one in about 30-45 minutes, depending on how much time we spent on topic discussion. I love that the book opens the door to discussion. It’s easy to just read a book and go on about your day, but the Christian scientific approach of this book makes it easy to delve even further. The Young Explorer’s Club curriculum encourages kids to expand their thinking skills and reading comprehension. It’s a wonderful companion to the book.

You can follow along with Purposeful Design on their blog, Facebook, and Twitter. Be sure to click the banner below to read reviews from my fellow Crew Mates. Thanks for stopping by!

Countdown to Thanksgiving e-book Review

November 11, 2014 by Becca Leave a Comment

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I love getting ahold of new ideas to help celebrate a holiday. I received a copy of Amy Puetz’s book, Countdown to Thanksgiving, to review. I’m just gonna go ahead and tell you that I love it! It’s 88 pages long, so it’s no small book! The countdown begins exactly 2 weeks before Thanksgiving Day on November 13th. Each day includes a story and an activity of some sort. It may be a song, a craft, a recipe(my favorite!), a game, or even a skit! There’s even a fun countdown sheet that you can copy with fun graphics, so you can mark off each day as you countdown to Thanksgiving.

I really love the stories. Most of them are from the late 1800s or early 1900s. I love reading old timey stories like the ones in the e-book. I enjoyed reading through this e-book SO much, and cannot wait to go through everything with the kids, and do our own Countdown to Thanksgiving! The book can be used with your family year after year!

Amy has lots of great resources on her website, so be sure to head on over and check them out!

*Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this e-book in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are my own, and I was not compensated in any other way.*

IXL ~ A Schoolhouse Crew Review

November 10, 2014 by Becca Leave a Comment

Christmas Book Review

Math and Language Arts are the basic foundations of learning, so it’s pretty important to learn and practice those skills as much as possible. I don’t think it’s possible to learn too much about these skills. What better way to practice, than to do so in a manner that feels like play? With IXL, that is entirely possible. Our family received a full year of access to IXL Math and IXL Language Arts. The Math portion is for grades Pre-K through Pre-Calculus, and the Language Arts portion is for grades 2-8. The pricing is as follows: a monthly subscription for 1 child and 1 subject is $9.95, plus $2 for each addition child. An annual subscription for one child is $79; for both subjects, the cost is $129. For this review, I used IXL with my 3 oldest children only.

The important thing to remember about IXL is that it’s not an actual curriculum, it’s for practicing skills that are being learned, or as a refresher of what’s been learned already. IXL is online and browser-based, so you do need internet access for it to work. At sign-in, you can choose which child will be working, or if you’re the parent, you would choose that option. Then depending on which subject is being worked on, you would go to Math or Language Arts, then the desired grade. Once you’ve chosen your grade, you then see all of the topics that are available in that grade. The Language Arts portion offers practice for almost 800 skills, and the Math portion offers more than 3,000 skills to practice. I seriously didn’t know that there were that many skills to learn! Thankfully, with the way it’s broken down by grade and topic, it’s not overwhelming at all. You can also view Common Core and state standards if you wish. To see a problem example for a topic, you can just hover over topic name, and a small window pops up. This is the 4th grade Place Values topic popup:
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Question are presented one at a time…not several like a worksheet would be. When a question is answered correctly, you move onto the next one. When it’s an incorrect answer, however, you see something like this:
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You can actually see what you did wrong, why it is the wrong answer, and what the correct answer is. You just click “Got It!” and it’ll move onto the next question. The sidebar on the right helps your child track their progress with how many questions they’ve done, how much time it’s taken, and what their SmartScore is. The SmartScore is proprietary to IXL, and helps measure your child’s mastery level of the topic.
When a skill is mastered, you’ll see a medal beside it on the topic list.
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You can click on Awards at the top of the screen to see all of the medals and virtual awards that have been earned. These are Ethan’s from earlier in the review.
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The boxes with question marks can be hovered over, and a pop-up window will tell you how to unlock that virtual reward. Both portions of the site work the same way. I just detailed the Math portion because that’s what we used the most of.

Under the Parent account, you can view the awards that each child has earned, as well as progress reports that will show skill or category performance, trouble spots, and usage detail for each child. These are pretty handy features to have.

I am really enjoying our IXL access. I just keep the computer signed in to our account, and each child can go find what they want to review, and they redo problems as many time as they want. Since it’s practice and not actual teaching, I don’t have to sit with the kids while they work. It doesn’t count against them since it’s practice. Ethan is very competitive, and so he would do the problems a few times over to see if he could beat his time. I love how easy it is to incorporate into a school day, because you can spend as much or as little time on problems as you want. I am also a graphics lover, so I love the fun pictures that you see when you win a new medal. If your child needs more practice, and you want it to be fun, check out IXL!

You can follow along with IXL on Facebook, Twitter, and Google +. Be sure to click the banner below to read reviews from my fellow Crew Mates. Thanks for stopping by!

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