Color Fold - A Timberdoodle Review

Hello Blog-land Friends!  We are so thrilled to once again be a part of this years Timberdoodle Official Blog Team that brings you fun and engaging Crazy Smart homeschool products! Today we have another fantastic Timberdoodle Product for you. 

This is the Color Fold Logic Puzzle by Thinkfun.   

We have enjoyed so many brain puzzles by Thinkfun through the years and this one has a fun new twist.  My married 24 year old daughter enjoyed it just as much as my homeschooled 12 year old daughter!  Dad even took a turn or two at solving the puzzle.

 The Color Fold puzzle comes with 40 different challenges ranging from Beginner to Expert level.  The back of the cards show the solution if you need a tip or you just want to see how it's done.  That was really helpful for the first time or two you were solving a puzzle.  Also - the self correcting nature of it lends itself to independent learning play for younger ones.

The fabric seems super durable and able to be folded for years to come!  I love that the puzzle is quite small and easy to throw into a bag for on the go learning and fun.

"The concept is simple: Fold the Cloth along the lines until only the colored squares shown on the Challenge Card can be seen. Finding the right combination of overfolds and underfolds will challenge even the most skilled puzzlers. Strengthen your visual perception and sequential reasoning skills as you fold and flip your way through 40 beginner to expert challenges!"

Timberdoodle sent this product in exchange for our honest review.

  You can also find Color Fold as part of the 11th Grade Curriculum Kit at Timberdoodle Company.

First Day of 7th Grade

 Here we are again, back to school! As a mom to three girls, this is my 18th "back to school" year. CRAZY!  This has been one crazy year, a year that I took off from blogging but I'M BACK! There is more to come on the reasons behind that and so many other fun things to post about so stay tuned! 

 This is most likely our next to last year homeschooling - potentially even our last year. Who knows? Our plan is for Boo to attend high school somewhere.  We have ALWAYS taken things a year at a time regarding their education.  There have been years we have had one in private, one in public and one homeschooling.  Do what works for your kiddo!   Boo is an absolute delight to homeschool because of the way she is wired.  She is super driven, more responsible than I am, and excels in her academics in a way that makes homeschooling a perfect fit for her.  I am learning right along with her in most of her classes this year.  There has never been a better time to homeschool because of the amazing amount of resources available.  She takes most of her classes on line, some self paced, and some live.  She has a few outside the home classes such as Latin, Art, and P.E. (which equals about 20 hours per week of dance classes!)  Her academic course load this year is INTENSE - but even so, homeschooling lets her still have plenty of time to just be a KID! This is something that is super important to us. 

Hello 7th Grade!! 

One of our homeschool traditions is to wake up to some fun first day treats. 

 What can be more fun in middle school than a "squishy" brain, along with a yummy treat to make you smarter? :)

 The Totally Awesome Book of Useless Information is from Daddy.  We always tell him he is a walking source of useless information.  She has her daddy's brain.  Super fun reading for lunch time!

 If you have followed our blog for any length of time, you know that we educate our girls classically, from a christian worldview, with Charlotte Mason methods thrown in.   This year marks the jump in classical education from the grammar stage to the logic stage, which means the beginning of Omnibus.  Omnibus is a Latin word meaning "all encompassing".  It's basically one course that covers history, literature and theology all in one.  The books covered in this course BOGGLE MY MIND.  We actually started this course a few weeks ago since it was new to us and we thought a soft start would make it a bit less overwhelming.  So far we are both really enjoying the course. In classical education, history is studied chronologically - starting from creation to present.  She completed the entire cycle in the grammar stage, and now we start again in the logic stage at the beginning and work through it again, and it is then repeated again in the rhetoric stage. 

 Omnibus really makes you THINK.  We have both enjoyed the conversations that are stemming from these studies. Right off the bat we are grappling with huge ideas such as predestination vs free will - not a light subject! More than a right or wrong answer to these questions (which I believe that this subject is actually a non-essential to the christian faith), I truly love how it makes us THINK.   Just because our curriculum is grounded in christian faith doesn't mean that this is the only thing that is taught. We learn everything from lots of different angles - we see what the Buddhists will have to say about things, what gnostics might think, evolutionist ideas or even an atheistic approach to hot topics.  

 Our readings this year will not be light! But the course is designed for a 7th grader, and is the same curriculum Boo has used from the beginning - so she is WELL prepared for it!  I will do a separate post detailing out our curriculum for the year with plenty of links.  We are also official Timberdoodle bloggers again this year so there will be lots of FUN homeschool product reviews this year as well.

 This year begins our formal studies of Logic! YAY! My older girls always enjoyed this subject so much and I know Boo will too.  We have DVDs that we will watch for each lesson so I'm looking forward to learning right along with her. 

I-phone picture

If you ask Boo what her favorite subject is, she almost always says LATIN!! She has the best Latin teacher in the world. Mrs Thompson is an absolute GIFT to us. Boo was lucky enough to have her first Latin class also fall on her first day of school this year.  This is her fifth year studying Latin and this year there are a total of 8 kids in her class - a new record.  She is so excited.  Here she is with her original Latin buddies - they have taken class together from the beginning, and have been friends since pre-school.

 This is our third year starting our mornings off with CNN10 - a quick ten minute news segment geared towards middle and high schoolers.  I've been amazed at how much Boo learns about what is happening in the world through these quick news segments.  It's a highlight to our day and we almost never miss it.  It's truly unbiased news if you are looking for that - TRULY (even for CNN!).

Don't you just love fresh new beginnings? I'm so ready for one.  There is just something that speaks to the soul when we have a blank slate in front of us, with fresh new pens and pencils, and a heart full of eager anticipation of what the next chapter will hold. To all of you mommas with littles heading off to kindergarten or to college (thats me!) I hope you soak up every moment of this coming school year with eager anticipation and everything that will fill their little hearts and minds. 

We Are Connected ~ A Timberdoodle Review

 Our first Timberdoodle product for this school year is the We Are Connected Dot to Dot Philadelphia!   We have always loved any kind of extreme dot to dot book around here - especially when they are so educational.  This book we received from Timberdoodle is all about the city of Philadelphia.   There is a map on the back of the book that shows famous landmarks with the corresponding page numbers.  We have actually spent some time in Philadelphia quite a number of times these past few years so this book helped "connect the dots" quite literally to places we have actually been! So fun! 

 I am always on the look out for simple activities that don't require too much brain work for read-aloud times or other times when we need to just keep our hands busy but still able to engage in listening or communicating or just being together as a family.  This book kept the interest of both my middle schooler and my soon to be college bound student (insert mommy tears here).  Honestly, I even enjoy doing these dot to dot books myself - they can be very satisfying!  The recommended age is 8+. You can even color them when you are finished.   The dots range anywhere from 156 to 1,690! Incredible!  Some puzzles even spread across both pages. 

 Timberdoodle even offers this book as part of their 11th grade curriculum kit so it truly does cross many age boundaries! A great activity for the entire family. 

You can pick up your copy of Dot to Dot Philadelphia at Timberdoodle by clicking right HERE!!