Disclosure: I received this complimentary product through the Homeschool Review Crew.

Our family loves living on our little mini four acre homestead. We grow gardens, raise animals, and have plenty of room to play. While we are not nearly serious enough to raise all of our own food, we do enjoy being able to raise what we can and teach our children about where their food comes from. As a part of this we enjoy finding ways to preserve our harvest. We enjoy canning, freezing, and dehydrating, but we are also learning about fermenting.  We were given the opportunity to review a starter kit from Fermentools to help us with our fermenting.

Last year, we also were able to try out their starter kit to make some delicious kraut. Over the course of the last year, I have played around with the timing of that recipe until I found a combination that was strong enough for my husband’s taste buds but not so strong that my children didn’t like it. I loved that I could make it my own way to work for our family.

With this new kit, I wanted to branch out and try fermenting some additional vegetables. First, since we had an abundance of cucumbers from our own vines this year, I decided to try fermenting my own pickles. I had a hard time imagining that I could truly make dill pickles without vinegar.

In the interest of full disclosure, the first time I tried to ferment this dill pickles, I made a mistake and they ended up soggy and gross. I had to send that batch to the chickens.

 I did a little research and realized my mistake. When I added the salt to the water, I did not mix it well enough and a lot of it settled to the bottom of the pitcher it was in. This meant that there did not end up being enough salt in the pickle jars.

The second time around, I was much more careful to make sure that they had plenty of salt and the pickles turned out much better. I was amazed that they went from cucumbers to pickles in just three to four days.

I love that the starter kit included not only the accessories that I needed to get started but also the right salt for good fermenting. All I had to add were a wide mouth jar, water, and whatever veggies I was going to ferment.  It also included an instruction manual and the Fermentools website has tons of recipes that you can use.

We are currently working on fermenting our own ginger ale and my children are super excited to give it a try. It should be a fun and healthy treat for them.

Overall, we really enjoyed the Fermentools starter kit. Whether you have lots of veggies in the garden that you need to preserve, you want the health benefits of fermented foods, or you just want to try a new hobby, this kit is a great way to get started with fermenting. It is a simple way to start on a small and easily manageable scale. 

I know that the members of the Review Crew tried a variety of recipes with their kits and encourage you to click on the graphic below to see what they tried and how they used their kit.

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This week the Review Crew is talking about writing lists and it got me thinking about what types of lists I regularly write.

I have to-do lists, curriculum lists, chore lists, book lists, grocery lists, and more. Life sometimes feels like a big series of lists and check-boxes.  

One day I might unpack that thought a little more but today I thought I would share a list of some of the books we are planning to read with my children this summer.

First, my husband is currently reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy with my seven-year-old. He certainly could not read it on his own, but he is really enjoying listening to his father read it and talks about it often.

Next, my older children and I are reading In His Steps together this month. We each have our own copy to read and then we will come together to discuss it. I read it many years ago and I am excited to revisit it with them.

I am looking forward to reading Wednesdays in the Tower aloud to everyone except the fifteen-year-old. We read the first book in that series during the school year and they loved it.

Finally, we are finishing listening to the Chronicles of Narnia as a family. This is not the first time we have listened to them, but this is the first time the younger children have heard it all straight through. We started while we were on a missions trip back in March and did over 20 hours of the 33-hour audio version. We will be finishing them up as we do a little traveling and riding over the summer.

In addition, we will be reading plenty of picture books with the younger boys but I do not have a set list for those at the moment. We will read whatever we have on hand or they pick out at the library. If you have any suggestions for good summer-themed picture books, please share them in the comments.

Make sure to check out what the other Crew Members had to say about making lists!

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Have you signed up for #LifeSkillsNOW? This is such a fun and beneficial program.

• Life skills help kids be confident, capable, and ready for anything.
• Your kids and teens will build critical thinking and know deep down that they can do hard things.
• Productive screen time instead of passive scrolling
• The #LifeSkillsNow Screentime Promise: We promise to give your kids the shortest amount of (productive) screentime possible, and then OFF into the real world.
• Expose your kids to topics you’ve never thought about (and might not know yourself).
• Bridges the gap in traditional education with practical life skills, critical thinking, tech savvy habits, and understanding money

If your feeling a bit overwhelmed with homeschooling and all the decisions and options, check out this boot camp with Kerry Beck that is live next week!

Journey Homeschool Science has some great online summer camps coming up soon! They are a fun way to keep the learning going for the whole family.

Disclosure: I received this complimentary product through the Homeschool Review Crew.

The middle school years can be challenging, even for homeschoolers. It is a time of growing up, hormonal changes, and often social issues. As I help my children navigate these challenging times, we lean on God and trust his word to help us to guide them. I was really excited when I read about Wise Up from Positive Action Bible Curriculum and the chance to review it.

Wise Up is a Bible curriculum that goes through the wisdom of the book of Proverbs. It is designed for students in grades 6-8 and includes a student workbook and a teacher’s manual.

I was excited to try it, but honestly when it first came in the mail, I thought I might have made a mistake.  It was a thick book with dense looking material. While we don’t mind deep study, I also knew that we were ready for a summer break.

We normally continue with Bible study through the summer, but in a lighter more devotional style.  I was afraid my daughter would resent the extra summer work.

However, I had no reason to be concerned. We got started and she enjoyed it so much, that the week she was at church camp she took her book with her. She wanted to work in it during her personal devotional time.

The curriculum is split up into 35 lessons, each one designed to take about a week.  Each week includes a teacher lesson that is done with the student and student exercises that the students complete independently. There are also weekly quizzes that can be used with the program.

For our family, Bible curriculum is more about learning and growing than grades, so we made the decision to skip the quizzes. However, if you needed grades or had a student motivated by grades they would make a great addition to the program.

They also included scripture memorization work that can be used with the course. We did not use that part this summer because we were already currently working on a scripture memory plan but we may add it in the fall when we finish our other program.

The teacher’s manual had three different sample schedules, three-day, four-day, or five-day. Since we were doing it over the summer, we modified the three day schedule. However, for the lessons we do in the fall I will probably use the four or five day schedule. I really appreciated how easy it was to customize.

I found that it worked well for me to do all of the teacher directed work for the week on one day, then I could let her finish the lesson exercises at her own pace during the week.

The teacher’s manual provided me with everything I needed to know to teach the lesson.  Each lesson has target truths that they want the student to learn. For example, in lesson three one of the target truths was “A wise person knows how to handle conflicts.”

It also gave teaching strategies, a script you can read for the lesson, and additional teaching suggestions.

The manual also included the pages from the student exercises with answers, which makes grading and discussing easier.

The student exercises had the students digging into different Bible passages and answering questions, completing charts, and filling in blanks. While much of it comes directly from the scripture, there were also questions that allowed them to reflect on those principles in their own life.

Overall, I loved that Wise Up had my daughter digging into scripture, dealing with difficult but important topics (pride, courage, fear, righteous thoughts, and sins of the flesh) and that it was well laid out. The only negative I found was that it could feel a bit overwhelming at first, but once we got into it we found it easy to use. We plan to continue slowly working our way through it over the summer and then including it in her regular school work in the fall.

Be sure to check out how other Review Crew families used it in their homes by clicking on the graphic below.  You can also check it out at Positive Action Bible Curriculum.

Disclosure: I received this complimentary product through the Homeschool Review Crew.

We have had the privilege of reviewing Volcanic Panic Reading Success Online from EdAlive over the last few weeks. My seven-year-old has struggled with reading and I am always looking for fun ways to encourage him to work on his reading skills.

Volcanic Panic Reading Success Online is an online game that works on reading and spelling skills. It was easy to get him set up and started on the game. When we started the game he could choose to play against another player or play against the computer.

The game had a die that was spinning and you clicked on it to determine the number of spaces that you moved. Then it would ask the student a question.

One of the first things that I noticed as he started playing was that he could click a button that said the question was too hard. This helped the computer to tailor questions to his level. The computer also read the questions aloud which was really helpful in allowing him to play independently. Too often I have seen him get messed up when he had to read the instructions because he did not fully understand the instructions.

We had him play against the computer since he was the only student. We were able to choose the number of players and turns.

There were different styles of questions. For some questions they would drag letters to boxes to spell the words. There were letters for him to choose from and then blanks to show them how many letters are in the word.

Other questions had the student finding the correct word to fit into a sentence. The computer would read the sentence and then the student had to choose from several words in the word bank.  Other times they would give you two sentences, with one word being different, and you had to choose the right one.

Another type of question had them choose a word that best described the picture. For example, it showed a small rat and asked which word described the rat. It gave choices like big and small.

Overall, we found this to be a great way to keep my son working on reading during the summer months. He felt like it was a fun game and would ask to play. I do not think that this game replaces reading instruction, but it does support the instruction and I think it helped reinforce the new skills he has been learning in his regular reading curriculum.

I would recommend Volcanic Panic Reading Success Online for students that need extra support in reading or as a summer enrichment activity for any beginning reader. It would be a great way to help prevent that dreaded ‘summer slide.’

You can go to EdAlive to find out more about Volcanic Panic Reading Success Online and also to find out about their other games. Some of our Review Crew also reviewed Baggin’ the Dragon Maths Online and Words Rock Online. Be sure to click on the graphic below to read more reviews and see what Crew Members thought about the different games.