Back to School Homeschool Haul: Amazon | Awesome Learning Resources for Older Kids

hey everybody Welcome to the Wallock way I'm Jessica and today's video is going to be a back to school haul these back to school hauls are something that I have done annually for years in case you're new here I'm homeschooling an only child who is 12 as of a few days ago and we'll be going into seventh grade for all intensive purposes um we are very lucky in the sense that I actually create the majority of the curriculum that we use so I like to spend more of my homeschool Budget on things that are going to bring fun excitement and connection into our home school that normally looks like a lot of books and a lot of games um and this year some extra school supplies too because we actually needed to replenish some of those so I am just going to get started because what you can't see just outside of the camera frame is that my dining room table is completely covered in stuff so we are going to start with the school supplies um the first thing that I have are these big mechanical pencils these are the9 mm lead what I love about them um is that because the lead is just a little bit larger than your typical 7 it really doesn't break like Emily uses these for her school work me Kevin and my dad actually I'll use them when we're doing um scores for archery because they are so convenient and the lead doesn't break um so anyway so I actually got two packs of these because we will go through them uh we typically put two or three in our quiver for archery and like I said Emily also uses them for school um I also grabbed I already dug into them so I don't have them in the package these big gelocity pins I got a back of the black a little while ago and I really really like them I'm not sure that I will plan with them because I love being able to erase and these do not erase but the colors make me happy they again are a wider um pin with a larger tip and they flow really nicely because they're gel and I really really loved all the colors I don't really know what I'm doing with them yet but I thought it would be a fun thing to add to um these caddies with all of our things in them so that Emily would have choices of different colors maybe we'll journal with them we like to journal with color pens uh and then speaking of erasable pens I did pick up a new pack of my favorite which are the friction fine liner erasable marker pens these kind of remind me of like the papermate flares which we love but I love that these erase so they're perfect for planning and then because I use the black more than anything I also grabbed a 12pack of just the black fine liners so I have the colors that has one black and then a 12pack of black as well some Expo markers mine and Emily's favorite are the ultra fine tip um which are really actually not that easy to find in like stores you almost have to order them but it's a the extra extra fine so not just your typical one with almost like a pin tip these are our favorite we do our um magnetic family calendar on the fridge with them anything dry erase that she needs to do for school she does with them um she has a chore chart that she keeps we use these for those as well and then I also grabbed the Expo wet erase markers um she uses these a lot for karate because they have like a one of those dry R sheets that she puts her stances and techniques in and she uses these to you know Mark off the ones that she's learned we use them as well for our calendar like I put the dates so I don't have to worry about them getting erased when I'm erasing other things meal planning I do that on a kind of a laminated sheet that I use over and over love them for things that I don't I want to treat like dry Ras but I don't want to just erase when my hand goes across them they're perfect for that Sharpie felt tip penss um we have used a lot of the micro Micron pens the problem is that Emily's favorite ones which are this they happen to be the same4 mm the tip keeps like going up into the pen so I'm hoping that this brand will work as well as those but won't break as frequently and they were a little more affordable and I was able to get four in the the thickness that she likes versus when you buy the assorted pack of the Micron you only get um the one of each thickness typically we will see uh let's see I also grabbed this 12C count of retractable Sharpie markers um the retractable ones I find so much easier I don't have to worry about taking a cap off and um when we do archery if we're shooting at paper targets specifically when Emily's doing 4 each she has to Mark where she hit on the Target that way if there's a bounce out um you would know exactly where it hit because your arrow wouldn't be in it but there also wouldn't be a mark on the paper and this is so much easier because you already have a quiver and a bow and you might be pulling arrows and being able to click with one hand and market and being able to have an assortment of colors so that when she gets out there on the field she can say oh nobody's using pink um I can just hand her a pink one and it comes in this you can't really tell but there's like a little plastic large pin protector that they all come in so I thought that was kind of cool make it easier to store in our backpack I also grabbed a new set um we have used these markers these exact ones for years and some of the colors are finally drying up so I grabbed a new set um a larger set this time since I know how much we love them I think instead of like the 80 count this was 101 so it's alcohol markers um it comes in this nice little case I don't know if we'll keep it in the case or not we really like our Cates but what I like about this set versus other sets is yes they might dry out faster or run out faster and they'll like the short term or long run but a lot of the alcohol markers are like really fat markers and Emily just doesn't like coloring with them because of that and these are like a standard pen size so they don't feel awkward in your hand it still has the Dual tip so you still have a fine tip and then the broad tip um it's just not like I said as like fat to hold in your hand uh this is the shuttle art brand don't worry I will link everything that you see in a link in the description I also grabbed some new color pencils we forever and ever and ever with the exception of our like nature journals have used the Crayola erasable ones because well they erase but Emily was finally ready to replace those so we are replacing them with 120 plus three I don't know why we needed plus three but these were 120 extra smooth soft um break resistant and I really also loved that it had the color on the end so whichever way we stored them you could tell what color they were for now they will live in this but probably not long term they'll probably live in AR caty I also grabbed some more of my favorite Post-it tabs because I use these for everything from bookmarks to um marking our place in curriculum to when I'm planning a unit study I'll mark all the different pages I want to reference I use them for everything and I also grabbed Emily some new magnetic bookmarks I don't really want to open the whole thing I managed to find cat magnetic bookmarks it's like I think 30 of them so she will love those that's going to be part of her um first day of school gift we do one of those every year to kind of kick off our school year um also we are trying a new math curriculum this year I will share more of that later but I grabbed the calculator that they recommend for her to use uh for pre-algebra I also got happened to be a pack of 12 just because that's the way it came these smaller um stno notebooks they're I think 6 by9 and my plan is to try a to-do list for Emily every day I don't know whether I'm going to write it for her I may start writing it for her so she can see what it looks like and then her writing it kind of based off of my plans like these are the homeschool plans that you have these are the chores I would like you to do today unfortunately maybe it's just me but I feel like when we reach this whole like tween age their brains become mashed potatoes or swiss cheese and Things fall through them so I want her to have something she can mark off to like know that she's getting the things done because things that I thought we had made habits that I wasn't going to need to remind her of anymore I'm finding myself reminding her of again like I had two years ago so my solution is hopefully going to be a to-do list in these CNO notepads every day um I'll let you guys know how that goes and then I grabbed her this will also be part of her back to school first day gift a ton I mean there's like 600 in here um I'm going to dump them on my table I just put them in a box that I already had but it's like 600 cute animal stickers um I thought she could decorate her own you know little to-do St notepad with them on any composition notebooks or anything else it would just be something fun that she can personalize her things with the speaking of composition notebooks I grabbed a couple three packs of composition notebooks I'm actually going to be teaching um a co-op class that will be doing quite a bit of writing so I got a couple of these so that I can give them some and then I grabbed this because I think we will see my plan was that this is what I'm going to use to organize my Co-op class because we're doing 12 units and there's 12 of these little like tabbed folders that has um a clear thing on side and then a clear thing on the back side so that would give me the ability to sort through all of them then there also happens to be a notepad in the back and a little pin holder so I'm hoping that it's going to be a convenient way to organize any loose papers that I need for each of the weeks as well as keep whatever notes and pin and not have to worry about needing a bunch of stuff that's my plan anyway moving on from school supplies into kind of resources one of our favorite things from the past I don't know four or five years as a math supplement has been the mathological liar and they're like these cases where you have to solve them because one of them is lying and they're lying because the math is bad um I think there's four people typically trying to defend their themselves Emily loves them they come in grade level so I think sixth grade was the last time that we were able to buy them cuz that's the last grade that they make and I was looking for something similar to that because she really really enjoys them and Emily is not a huge fan of math so anything that she enjoys and is willing to do I'm all about and I found this two Truth and One Lie it's for sixth seventh and eighth grade um it says it's 101 daily activities we won't do them daily uh typically Kevin does a steam like lesson with Emily once a week and that's when they were doing mathological liar I don't know whether they'll do multiple of these or not but basically what it is is there's three kind of problems if you will on each page and two are true and one is a lie and so you're trying to figure out by solving them which of the three statements below is the lie and it's even split into a sixth grade section a seventh grade section and an eighth grade section if that's important to you to know like okay we're only going to do the sixth grade section this year and then we'll save the seventh grade section and then the eighth grade we're just going to work our way through it technically em in 7th so six should be review but again anything that makes MTH fun I'm all about so that's what we're going to do for that I also grabbed the seventh grade Brain Quest smart trivia card deck um we really enjoy these in our morning basket which doesn't happen in the morning anymore but it's just a fun way to kind of review a whole bunch of different skills and also open the door to things that maybe we haven't learned yet or um talked about and see what Emily may or may not be interested in I thought these would be a fun addition to our morning time as well they are SAT vocabulary word teasers um it like it just tells you to draw a card from the box but there's like a question and the definition of the word is on the back of that card so for example the question on one is is there ever a good reason to prevaricate which looks like I'm going to need to know that cuz I don't even know what that word is um and then on the back it gives you the pronunciation it's function like it's a verb its definition and then a synonym for that word so this will be a fun way for us to do some vocabulary quick easy low hassle uh for writing this year um I really wanted to focus on helping Emily through the stages of writing like a novel because she has started a lot of different books and she hasn't finished them um because I don't think she knows how to so so I grabbed a few books to help me guide her better um I have the Brave the page which is by Nano rimo I think is how you say it we're going to go with that um which is a like November monthly writing program that we have done in the past um I also got a young writer's handbook spill the ink and how to write a novel before you turn 13 I've briefly looked through these all three of them look really good um I will keep you guys updated on which one ends up working the best for her uh let's see this day in history for kids we did a similar book to this in our morning time last year I thought it would last us multiple years it did not because we loved it so much so when I saw this one I was like yes please um CU it's by the History Channel it's 101 remarkable moments and fascinating facts and it's very similar to the one that we did last year you just turn to the date and it has um you know different ways to travel through Time by each day 1969 this day marks the internet's symbolic birth uh 2007 Martin Stell finishes swimming the entire length of the Amazon River and in 2020 Tony fiser temporarily grabs a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records by building the largest functioning Rubik's Cube so that kind of gives you an idea of some of the different things again they will be random it will be fun but I love the rabbit trails that we end up going down because of the things that we've talked about in here are in these types of books um last year we did a pretty big exploration unit study and it used the DK exploration book kind of as a base and we loved that book like loved it so I decided to pick up the others in that series for Emily just to kind of peruse at her will so we have inventors which is incredible stories of the world's most ingenious inventions like I said we just really like the way it was set up it was like a spread for each inventor or Explorer the illustrations were gorgeous it was bite-size information but it wasn't like dumbed down um and it was just really fun to look at so I thought that would be kind of fun thing to add plus we have the um stem unit study that we could add to that one and we have scientist inspiring tales of the world's brightest scientific methods and artist inspiring stories of their lives and their works and here this one's probably the prettiest in my opinion because it's art okay so I typically share with you guys what we're going to do in our homeschool on a quarterly basis because if I was to tell you everything I thought we were going to do right now first of all I don't know everything second of all um it could change because I try to follow ml's interest and because of that I don't know what we're going to be doing in March of this year what I do know is that the co-op class that I'm teaching is a fairy tale based Co-op class so I have some resources for that and then I know that we are going to be doing a decent sized American study in our home school that will be a mix of kind of traveling the states um an election study um American history all of this I will tell you more about when I talk about our fall homeschool plans um but this next set of stuff that I'm going to show you is kind of what I purchased knowing that those were going to be the first few things that we studied so I grabbed the happily ever after Mad Libs for our fairy tale Co-op um this is more for me to read to teach the kids than it is like I'm not going to be reading it to them but I grabbed lessons from Grim how to write fairy tales and then I got a bunch of Fractured Fairy Tales because I thought it would be really fun to like read the fairy tale have the classic version and then read some different fractured options to give them ideas before they try to write their own so I have each of these books um believe me Goldilocks rocks the story of the Three Bears told by baby bear No Lie pigs and their houses can fly the story of The Three Little Pigs told by the wolf honestly Red Riding Hood was rotten the story of Little Red Riding Hood As Told By The Wolf for real I paraded in my Underpants the story of The Emperor's New Clothes told by the emperor Tres me Hansel and gredle are sweet obviously that's the story as told by the witch so each of these as you can tell from kind of like the villain's perspective trust me Jack's beanock stinks seriously Cinderella is so annoying seriously Snow White was so forgetful frankly I never wanted to kiss a boy really Rapunzel needed a haircut frankly I'd rather spend myself a new name truly we both loved Beauty dearly believe me I never felt a pee and no kidding mermaids are a joke and then for ones that were maybe not individual I also grabbed um this one which is the stinky Cheeseman and other fairly stupid Tails so it says chicken licken the really ugly duckling the torus and the hair but like ha a i r hair um Cinder Rumple stilt skin little red running shorts Jack's Bean problem and much much more so I thought those would just be a really fun way to introduce kind of another perspective um for fairy tales and then uh Kevin will be helping me teach this Co-op and he like I said is the stem science technology engineering math like that's way more his thing so I grabbed him this to do with the kids which is the science of fairy tales it is um 25 classic Tales through Hands-On experim experiments so for an example um let's see we have Little Miss Muffet as the tale and then create your own chemical change which is like um the baking soda in a bottle with a balloon um Goldilocks and the Three Bears as the story and then um explore the science how can a larger larger bowl of porridge cool off faster than a smaller bowl of porridge and then they have like the science experiment that you're going to do to explore that all right I didn't get nearly as many books for our American study yet cuz I really need to shop finish shopping our shelves a little bit more I think I have some stored away somewhere um what I did grab though is the United States of Mad Libs United tweets of America and only in America the weird and wonderful all right now on this side of the table I have most of the books that I purchased for the school year the first kind of set of things things that I grabbed were some graphic novel series for Emily she's recently gotten into graphic novels and I wanted to kind of encourage that and let her know that I'm totally okay with her reading them but I tried to find Series so that she could get into them because she prefers Series so I grabbed Katie and the cats sitter and I got the first three I think there's four but I only grabbed the first three of that one um and then I grabbed the animal rescue friends again the first three in that series um and then she's really into Warrior Cats and I realized that they also have a graphic novel Series so I grabbed the first four of the warrior cats and then I tried to pick a few topics in the science Comics that I thought she would really like so I have birds of prey dinosaurs and cats and then um I think these and maybe one of the other series I will actually give her as her back to school gift um and then the others I will just like kind of slowly dish out shrew whatever I don't like give her all of the stuff back to school I just have it all ready um also something that she has been really into for a while is poetry and she read I think it was last year it may have been school year before last um a few books are that are verse in free verse um the crossover and Otter and she really liked them and then I'm not sure that they did another one the following year in book club so I specifically went searching for books written in freee so that she could have a few of them because she really liked it so I got love that dog starfish the Canyon's Edge and alone and if you are not sure what free verse is I will show you an example basically the entire book each chapter is a poem um so that is love her dog this is starfish uh I will say that the free verse books in Emily's opinion when she did the two that she's done so far um she said it was much better to read with your eyes versus audio because the audio book just didn't do it justice with the free verse part uh okay speaking of book club I like to buy the book club books for Emily so that I don't have to depend on the library having them in stock um and that way as soon as she's finished with one I can hand her the next one and say this is your next one and she can just kind of read it at her Leisure I she knows ahead of time when the book club dates are and she knows she has to have it done by then she has missed that a couple times and luckily Mary is amazing and she still lets them participate in class and she'll just tell the other kids don't spoil the ending which they're really good about um but I like her to just have them that way I don't have to worry about I can say here's your next one and this is when the due date is and I normally will put a sticky note on the front so she knows when that is and she doesn't forget um this year and keep in mind I didn't pick these Mary Hannah Wilson did she is amazing at picking great literature for kids the last Matt maker The False Prince Mercy Suarez keepers of the lost city good different masterminds the war that saved my life the first state of being and the Mona Lisa vanishes now most of the time Emily reads these independently there are sometimes when I really want to read a book and so we will read it aloud I can tell you right now the mon lease that vanishes is at the top of my I want to read list just from what I've seen so far so that one we will probably read aloud um I haven't looked into the others in depth enough to know whether I want to read them aloud or not I also know that I want to read a a lot and a lot is relative I would like to read as much American based literature as possible during our American study um and by that I mean written by American Authors which I haven't picked those yet um because I'm actually hoping to do novel studies for those I will keep you updated on that but I did go ahead and pick up a good handful of kind of books that were set um either in America or you know like historical fiction type of books that I thought would be great during that study I don't know that we will read all of these I may give some to Emily to read independently I may read some aloud but I know that this time of year A lot of people are getting their books to go along with their history and I didn't want to have to deal with them being higher in price later or me not being able to get my hands on them um and I was able to get a lot of these during the buy two get one free sale so I have Roll of Thunder here my cry I'm pretty sure this is one way will definitely read because it is the only book for my entire like public school education that I remember vividly like I remember I don't know I think it was my fifth or sixth grade teacher read it to us aloud and we would like put our heads down on the desk and she turned the lights off it is one of my most fond memories it may have been just being read aloud to it may have been the book I don't know but I definitely wanted to do that one because of that um caddy woodlon across 5 aprils Johnny taine The Witch of black bird pond carry on Mr bod witch and then I also got chains now this is a Trilogy I only got the first one because if we love it then I'll get book two and three um which is Forge and Ashes but I didn't want to get those in case we weren't a fan of um the author's writing we just haven't read anything by her yet the mostly true Adventures of Homer PE fig Gold Rush girl and miracles on Maple Hill and kind of the last set of books that I purchased are we're going to just call them self-improvement books for Emily um become a better human I don't know but I wanted to add a book to our morning time that we could slowly make our way through um last year we ended up doing uh like a health book and we did um a couple different like Teenage survival skills and um Middle School critical thinking type of books um we talked about money a little bit and those things ended up becoming like this the bouncing board for so many amazing conversations um and so many like habits forming and it it just showed me that like I want to do more of that with Emily as she gets older so I tried to pick kind of like like I said self-improvement type of books that we could read together that we could actually both get something out of um so I have just as you are which is a teens guide to self-acceptance and Lasting self-esteem eat that frog uh 21 great ways to stop procrastinating and get more done in less time I mean I can use this now at 37 uh this one is How to Win Friends and Influence People for teen girls so the back says this is kind of what sold me more than the title The Essential guide for a new generation of empowered Savvy and conf confident young women raising a screen smart kid uh let's see that says embrace the good and avoid the bad in the digital age winning the war in your mind forens change your thinking change your life and then the seven U Habits of Highly Effective teens I actually read just the original um Seven Habits of Highly Effective teens so I'm really are highly effective people so I'm really excited to read this one with Emily um and see what he pulled from that for the teenagers okay last up we have games now this year when I purchased games I purchased with three kind of categories in mind one is that it kind of matched up with a study I knew we were going to do um for sure which there's only two of those I just talked about those two is that it was a two-player game because I find that Emily and I need well we just need more of those in a household in general because there are a lot of times when it's either just me and Emily or just Kevin and Emily um and there's just only so many two-player games we have so I wanted to add add some of those to our collection or the third one is that it was a game that would play in under 20 minutes which I will explain why that was a huge category um in just a minute so let's go ahead and start with ones that I knew would work with a unit study for our fairy tale study I only grabbed two this is a card game called wacky fables and then I grabbed the Rolla tale um fairy tale dice just roll the dice look at the pictures tell a tell I thought these would both kind of be really great quick Icebreaker type of games to go along with when we're doing the fairy tales at Co-op um just you know something to get them you know doing things together or talking out loud with the roll tell I'm probably going to have them add on to stories instead of just telling them on like like each kid roll a dice and or two dice and continue the story so that way it's kind of a Cooperative game um and then I told you we're going to be doing a United States study we already have quite a few games to go with that but I did grab the top trumps um bundle which included top trumps the United States uh top trumps US president and then top Trump's Washington DC um honestly these are the two I wanted the United States and the presidents but it was cheaper to get all three and I figured it wouldn't hurt to have Washington DC maybe we'll play it anyway uh rolling America it is like an American themed um dice rolling game by game right the 50 states of trivia game the 50 states 8 bingo game I just like the illustrations on this one and then the newer 10 days in the USA this is a remake of an amazing classic I cannot wait to play it because I loved the original like 10 days in America or Africa games um and then I got the scouted out which is the ultimate guessing board game with maps facts and fun so those are the ones that I got with the intention of going along with a unit study hopefully um and then the two player games that I grabbed I didn't get a ton I just wanted to add to the collection that we already have so I grabbed um Brave rats which is a duel of Clashing Clans um I'm going to say qul I don't know how to pronounce this um but it is this gorgeous game um where each player takes different stones and you're stacking them and I did get the mini version because eventually I'm going to run out of room for games so I wanted the smaller one possible um I did the same thing with quto which is by the same company I grabbed the Mini version um it's another one where you are kind of moving and stacking the pieces um Donuts it is a tasty and tactical Clash for two players and then this is one Emily got for her birthday um but I had it on my list for back to school two-player games it is Boop it is so adorable um based off of what we've read so far it is a very thinky game for two clever cats but basically you're playing on like this big bed and every time you place a kitten um it boops the other ones one space away from it and then after you get three kittens in a row you upgrade to a cat and whoever gets three cats in a row wins I think that's very basic um we read the back of the box but it's cats it was a two-player game like I knew Emily was absolutely going to love it so she can't wait to play that one I just like she literally got it for her birthday two days ago and I stole it and said let me put this in the video and then you can have it okay the last category like I told you is games that play in under 20 minutes and I will do a whole video on this because I I've already dissected our entire game shelf and pulled games that play in under 20 minutes which is how I knew how many more I wanted to add um and the reason I want games that play in under 20 minutes is because as a mom of a tween we are home less now than ever before um and when we are home I swear I feel like we were going in a hundred different directions because typically I'm like um let me run Emily to karate and K's like I'm going to stay home and cook dinner so that when you guys get home we canat eat at 10:00 at night um and we're just like it's it's like that all the time one of us is running out the door with her while the other of us is either working or it's just it's been an adjustment um to this lifestyle and I'm not complaining because I love the season that we're in right now it just means we need some adjustments and one of those adjustments is that I want to have quicker play games so that there's not ever a time when we can't play a game like oh we only have 15 or 20 minutes I now have a whole stack or in this case drawer or whatever of games that we can just immediately pull from the other idea that we had um and I'll share more about this too is that we are going to make a list of all of the games that we have that play in under 20 minutes and somehow based off of that list we're going to randomly pick a number roll a dice um spin a spinner pick a piece of paper I'm not sure exactly yet and um that is the game we're going to play after dinner it won't be every night after dinner because on Karate nights we're already not eating until 10:00 and getting to bed at like 11: or 12 we don't have 15 or 20 extra minutes that night but most nights like before we go do dishes and kind of all go our separate way for the rest of the evening we can set aside 15 to 20 minutes and end our day connecting as a family with a game we already played game at dinner like a trivia game why not just have one more snuck in there that's my plan anyway again I promis to do an updated video with all of those details in the meantime here are the games that I bought that I sourced that should play in under 20 minutes but we need to play them before I add them to that list Marvel Mayhem I do actually know this one will play in under 20 minutes because we already have the Dungeons and dragon version of this game um and Emily got the Marvel Mayhem for her birthday so this one I do know for sure we'll play quickly it's a lot of fun we love the other versions which is why she added this one to her list King's gold according to the box it's going to play in 15 minutes exploding minions this was another one Emily got for her birthday according to the box it's going to play in 15 minutes couch kittens birthday game for Emily um it will play it's a two-player game as well and it will play in five to 10 minutes so this one could be a quick play or a two-player game it goes both ways let's see lucky dogs 5 to 15 minutes it is just a dice rolling game so write up Kevin's alley this one is timeline twist it says it will play in 20 minutes we will see but I I think if it doesn't it can be modified to make work no thanks the card game uh let's see this one says it will play in 20 minutes sequence dice it claims 15 minutes add Mundy Wild Ones so if you've been watching any of my gamees school videos you know we love the original of this and this just kind of takes it up a notch so now it's like fractions and decimals um for 9 plus it's like bigger numbers money it would be the next step up and the original as Mundy does play pretty quickly and I think this one will too they say 15 minutes I would say that's probably about accurate spots this is another dice rolling dog game it says 30 minutes on here but I have high high hopes that with less players it might go faster so we'll see skip bow it doesn't have a Time on it so we have to test that one ghost Blitz 2 sorry this is Ghost Blitz 2 um it says 20 to 30 minutes but I think with less players it would play faster and I think we can even um modify it that we would need less cards to win so that we can make it faster too and anything that I modify in whatever list I end up making I would write like the modifications that I made to make it faster on there so that I know every time we play it like oh we're only going to collect four cards to win instead of six or whatever modification I might make Museum suspects it says 20 minutes Ticket to Ride New York is 10 to 15 because it's a smaller game board so it is still all of the same Ticket to Ride fun but New York and London are the two that have a smaller game board so the gamepl is quicker like this is the whole game board for New York and um while I like New York and London I figured since we were possibly doing America New York made more sense for us if we love it then I will add London to the collection as well uh world word roll it is basically a yatsi Style version actually it's like yatsi and Scrabble mixed um because you end up with like dice that you're trying to roll and you have these cards that increase the points and you have points on the letters on the dice so you're trying to make the larger Point word um it says that it will play in 20 minut minutes and you guys know Kevin loves JSI so anything that rolls dice I'm always trying to add to our collection for him um we love the game ecosystem and it does play in roughly 20 minutes so I'm hoping these two do as well this is ecosystem coral reef and ecosystem Savannah and even if they don't then I'll just move these over to the science section of our game school because that's where ecosystem is and it's amazing um and then this is strike the Harry Potter version so we have the original strike which we love um and then there's another like element impact it's very similar gameplay they just don't call it strike we really like that as well and I thought um we could add the Harry Potter version because well it's Harry Potter and I think my plan is for games that are almost the same gamep playay but different theme is that I would put like strike and in parentheses list the three that we have so we could pick which of those three we wanted to play that night or that time that's my thought process anyway um like I said I will update you when I actually finish playing through all of these and when I make the list um and how we're going to go about it but my plan is that we will have some way to have quickplay games and not pull the same one over and over and over because we really bad about that like we're really bad about oh uh we'll just use this one for example sequ dice is out we just played it last night it's on the table we'll just play it again and there's nothing wrong with that um but we have so many amazing games that we just out ofsight out of mind or whatever so I want a better system um I want them kind of all in one place so I may either make a whole shelf of them I may clean out a drawer in this and put them all in there but I want some sort of system for games that we can quickly play and hopefully that will help us even when we're short on time get in more gameplay which is one of my goals for this school year so that's everything that I purchased with our seventh grade home school year in mind that doesn't mean that I won't get more stuff because obviously I don't know what unit studies we're doing for the rest of the year um I have no idea about holiday studies yet uh so I'll obviously be getting stuff from that and then books I'm sure that she'll have more more interest and so I'll purchase her more books for whatever her interests are I'm sure we'll be adding more games but for the most part me being intentional with this upcoming homeschool year this is what I purchased hoping that we would have a great year full of connection um with you know lots of reading lots of fun Hands-On and games because I'm be honest with you Hands-On fun middle school stuff is becoming more and more difficult to find so I'm having to really think outside the box to source and make sure that I'm still keeping all of that on hand for her because I don't want to see our hom school take a turn for drill and kill I've worked way too hard to keep it away from that um so I'm really trying to prioritize connection and fun and all of the things that we've done for all these years and so this is the things that I purchased with that in mind for seventh grader