I recently discovered a lovely bunch of fellow book-lovers on Instagram known as the #bookstagram community.
We take pictures of our favorite books and bookish items, share book recommendations, tag each other in book challenges, chat about what we’re reading, and just enjoy a lovely, happy place where seriously every single person I’ve come across is kind and encouraging! It’s the best!
You can find me there as Read.Write.Coffee.
If you love books and are on Instagram, come join in the fun! 🙂
Last month I received a free copy of Toward a Secret Sky by Heather Maclean from Blink YA Books to review, via my participation in the Z Blog Squad over at Zonderkidz.
I really wanted to like this YA mystery/thriller. It has a gorgeous cover, with a quote from the author of Caraval calling it, “Mysterious, romantic, and totally fun!”
The story is about a girl named Maren who finds herself in Scotland after her Mom’s unexpected death. She quickly discovers that angels and demons are real, danger is afoot, and she’s caught up in the middle of it all thanks to a mysterious journal her Mom left behind.
Unfortunately the voice didn’t quite grab me, and I had a lot of trouble getting into it. I’m finally over halfway through, but I’m still afraid this book might eventually end up on my “did not finish” pile. Despite the fact that Blink only publishes clean YA, so the romance doesn’t ever progress beyond kissing, I feel like there’s a ton of “Oh wow he’s so hunky I think I might faint” moments (that’s not an actual quote, just the basic gist of how the romance feels to me). There’s also plenty of “He loves me, he loves me not” drama, which isn’t really my thing.
It does feel a little like a less scary Frank Peretti book for younger readers at times, and I do love Frank Peretti.
I suppose I might recommend this book for conservative readers who want to be able to dip their toes into a romantic thriller without the risk of scandalous bedroom scenes. That said, I feel like the amount of focus Maren spends on being infatuated with guys is a tad on the ridiculous side. Also, all of a sudden halfway through the book Maren thinks “damn” which I didn’t expect since books published by Blink supposedly don’t have any cursing. Not a big deal at all, just something someone expecting a 100% clean book might frown about.
Of course everyone’s taste in books is different and what feels predictable and not believable to me may be absolutely perfect for someone else, so if the premise sounds intriguing then maybe download a free sample of the eBook or see if it’s at your local library so you can check it out.
I love homeschooling, but when it comes to art, I used to feel like my girls were missing out because I didn’t know how to teach them. I was thrilled to to have the opportunity to review the Entire Level III art classes from ArtAchieve that solves this problem for me.
ArtAchieve offers five levels of art classes for beginning to advanced artists. Each of the lessons have PowerPoint and video versions to choose from, so you don’t have to have a background in art to be able to teach rich, inspiring art lessons. The videos clearly present the entire lesson to the extent that I can hand my ten year old the supplies, log her in to the lesson, and then walk away. #coffeebreak 😀
Each lesson shares the inspiration behind the art you will be making that day, goals for the lesson, a warm up activity that uses an included printable page, step-by-step detailed drawing instruction, direction for coloring in the drawing with whichever medium the lesson is featuring, and reflection questions. Each lesson also reminds you of some rules for drawing. I especially love rule number five, “There is no right or wrong way to draw. One drawing is not better than another. It’s just different — because the people who are drawing are different.”
The lesson pages inform you of what supplies are required and approximately how much time the lesson requires to complete – broken down into time to draw and time to color, in case you want to spread the project out over multiple days. The lessons are all inspired from art around the world and each one also includes suggestions for cross-curricular connections in subjects such as geography, social studies, history, literature, music, writing, architecture, science and more.
Evergreen and Boo both LOVED the Entire Level I art classes that we received to review last year. It was their favorite curriculum ever. In fact, it was such a huge hit that we purchased Level II ourselves! After completing the full project for each lesson, Evergreen likes to play the lesson again on a phone or iPad in her room where she does just the drawing portion of it again and again, tweaking different portions to her liking, and then either leaving it as is or coloring it with markers or colored pencils. Her drawing skills have improved a ton through the ArtAchieve lessons. Because it’s harder for me to arrange a time when she can paint without her sisters also wanting to, or where she and her sisters all paint and I supervise to make sure there aren’t epic messes, her skills with a paintbrush are her least advanced right now. That said, she’s gaining skill and confidence with those through the Level III classes, too, whenever as I give her the chance.
The Level III classes are a bit too advanced for Boo who is seven, but Evergreen is ten and had been having a wonderful time with them. She decided to begin with the lesson THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST TOTEM POLE that involved drawing the outline on a long thin strip of watercolor paper and then painting it with acrylic paints. She ended up re-doing the drawing portion about half a dozen times before she felt like she was happy with it, but in the end she was proud of her finished product and said she had a great time making it. This lesson lists a number of selections of Native American literature that tie-in to the class which I thought was really great. It also provides cross-curricular connections for social studies, writing and science.
The next lesson she decided to try her hand at was KANDINSKY AND COLOR MIXING. I actually really wanted to do this one with her, but I didn’t have the chance. She said she loved doing it though and would be happy to repeat it with me sometime. Because Kandinsky lived in Germany while the Nazis were rising to power, the cross-curricular connections for this lesson include a number of social studies and language arts options related to WWII. I think this would actually be a nice project to include when covering that era in our history studies.
Evergreen has completed a number of other lessons from the Entire Level III set and really enjoyed each one. I highly recommend ArtAchieve as a wonderful resource for homeschool art classes. Be sure to hop over to the Homeschool Review Crew link-up to see what other reviewers have to say.
A few weeks ago Zonderkidz sent me a free copy of The Bible Explorer’s Guide by Nancy I. Sanders to review. 🙂
My seven year old, Boo, was so excited about this book that includes 1,000 Amazing Facts And Photos. The second it arrived she gleefully grabbed it and ran off to flip through the pages. With a plethora of pictures on every page, she was absorbed in it for the longest time.
When I got the chance to look through it with her, I discovered there were all kids of facts that even I didn’t know. The pictures helped both of us get a better feel for the setting of many of the stories in the Bible. I was especially intrigued by pictures and descriptions of daily life in Bible times, such as what a typical home was like, and how they pressed olive oil and ground wheat.
Boo loved the pictures of different types of paper, and even pieces of broken pottery that were used to write on, and we had a long discussion about what a great blessing it is that we actually get to each have our own Bibles to read whenever we want.
The pages also include snippets of important moments in the Bible, and often let us know where we can turn in the Bible to read more about it, which was quite helpful.
I’m so happy to have this lovely resource. It truly does help the Bible come alive, and gives us lots to talk about together as we peruse all the interesting pictures and learn new facts. Everyone in my family from my three year old to my husband has enjoyed the striking images and thought-provoking information in The Bible Explorer’s Guide.
A few months ago I received a Global Water Quality chemistry kit from Thames and Kosmos to review for the The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine. You can find my full review on their site.
Here is a portion of my review, and a few pictures of the kit! 🙂
__________
As a mom of four girls, keeping STEM subjects engaging for my daughters is one of my top priorities. One of the ways I try to achieve this goal is by integrating hands-on science into our homeschool day as often as possible. My nine year old has always loved chemistry, so she was excited to try the Global Water Quality chemistry kit from Thames and Kosmos.
The eight experiments it walks you through are all fairly simple. First you get to make a basic water filtration tower to see that you can get muddy water to look clean fairly easily. However, in the very next experiment you attempt to filter watercolor paint or ink to see that your simple filter is not actually providing clean water. Experiment three is simply dissolving salt in a little water and then waiting a few days (or in our case, over a week) for the water to evaporate and leave behind the salt. The next experiment is of a similar vein and lets you eventually taste water that has evaporated from salt water and then condensed and collected in another container. Experiment five is pretty fun because you get to watch cress grow from seeds in three separate containers and then test the effects of salt, vinegar and not being watered on the plants. The sixth experiment is the one we weren’t able to do because we don’t own a kitchen scale, but if you have one you get to cut some fruits and vegetables and weigh them and then monitor their weight over the course of a few days to see that as the water inside the plants evaporates they become lighter. For the next experiment you get to measure the pH value of a variety of liquids. The final experiment involves collecting carbon dioxide from mixing baking soda and vinegar in a plastic bottle and then forcing the carbon dioxide into water in another plastic bottle to see what happens. I actually don’t really ever buy bottles of water or soda or anything so we weren’t able to do this experiment either.
Some of the experiments include ideas for ways to expand on the experiment. For example, after after you create your first water filter tower it offers ideas of other items to include in the tower such as paper and sawdust. Then, after discovering that the water filter tower doesn’t do anything about watercolor or ink, the manual encourages you to try making a filter that uses activated charcoal, though you would need to go out and purchase some yourself. After each experiment, the manual explains why you got the result that you did, and why it’s important when thinking about cleaning water, the necessity of access to clean water, or the problem of water pollution.
This kit is recommended for ages eight and up, and for the most part my nine year old was able to conduct the experiments without any help. While it’s certainly easiest to just hand my daughter the kit and let her work independently, I think her experience may have been richer if I had held onto the manual myself and told her what to do, because the explanations spoil the surprise of actually getting to see what result you get from your experiment. While the placement of the explanations makes them very simple to find, I actually wish that they had all been at the end, or even in a separate booklet so we could have enjoyed a greater sense of discovery as opposed to setting up experiments while already knowing what was going to happen.
My daughter says she loved this kit and just wished that there had been more experiments to do. I’m not sure that the number of experiments is actually a con, though, because I feel like a kit that leaves my daughter still wanting to explore the subject more is a good thing. I do wish that the kit had been a bit more specific in the instructions for some of the experiments, though. There were several that we had to attempt multiple times before we got them to work due to the vagueness of the instructions. For example, in the first experiment, building a water filter tower, the instructions tell you to mix water and a teaspoon of dirt to create some dirty water, but it doesn’t tell you how much water to use. On our first attempt, we literally waited an entire day after adding the dirty water without a single drop of it making it all the way through the tower. The experiment that included growing cress seeds also just said to sprinkle sand on top of the seeds but didn’t say how much, and then it instructed us to moisten well. Because my daughter ended up putting varying amounts of sand and water in each container, the cress actually only grew well in one of the three containers. On the one hand, it was a good lesson on needing to be precise with science experiments, but on the other hand, it would have been nice to have three sets of plants to test during the main portion of the experiment. Also, even with the good lesson about being precise, if she had precisely added the exact amount of sand and water that resulted in the cress not growing well at all then we wouldn’t have had anything for the second part of the experiment.
The experiment that was supposed to teach us about salt water evaporating and then condensing into fresh water, like rain that is created from seawater, completely failed on our first attempt. I ended up doing some research on my own before we attempted it again, but it still only barely worked. We really needed a hot, sunny day for the experiment, but it was the middle of winter and even here in Texas we didn’t have the optimal weather.
Of the eight experiments, my daughter’s favorite was testing the pH level of various liquids. Half of the experiments in this kit require at least a few days of just waiting, but this one had immediate results. It also allowed my daughter to get as creative as she wanted in selecting liquids to test, which she really enjoyed. She had a great time discovering how acidic, neutral, or basic different beverages and cooking ingredients are. We didn’t get a chance to collect any rainwater or pond water or anything to test, but she ended up using all the strips we had. I’m sure she would enjoy getting more indicator strips in the future to keep testing stuff.
All in all, this was a pretty good kit for $14.95. I appreciated the emphasis on the importance of clean water. I’ve been to a village in Zambia where children had to collect murky water from a shallow well, and I had the privilege of being present as a deep, sealed well our church had funded was drilled for the village. It was a moving experience and ever since I’ve talked to my kids a lot about how blessed we are to have clean water. Going through the experiments in the kit with my daughter provided a number of good conversation starters with her about why having clean water is so vital for everyone. The experiments we did may not have been very flashy or exciting, but the subject they were focused on is an important one.