TOS review: Travel Kits E-book

Have you ever traveled with kids? Growing up, we did a lot of car traveling with my family--long distance car traveling! I, of course, was well behaved and never asked "Are we there yet?" (HA) And I sure haven't been asked that as a parent either. (again, HA)

Well, the e-book Travel Kits: A Simple Way to Bless Others is a solution to the problem of travel boredom. It is written by Donna Rees and published by The Old Schoolhouse Magazine. The name Travel Kits only explains part of what this book is about. I have heard about taking a paper bag and filling it with treats to dole out slowly over the course of a long trip. This book takes the paper bag to a whole new level.

In a nutshell, Travel Kits are a kit you put together with small gifts for the recipient to open while they are traveling. The book is full of ideas of gifts, how to wrap the gifts, ways to present the gifts (how about putting all the gifts in a cooler for a trip to the beach), and ideas on when to present the gifts while traveling. I wish I had this book last year before our big Europe trip! (The author has a great idea for storing small snacks, like Skittles that I never would have thought of.) In addition, there are lots of pictures of travel kits the author has put together. I loved the bright, colorful pictures.

Here's how the publisher describes travel kits:

Not:

Toiletries
Required
As
Vacation
Essentials
Loaded from home.

Kits
Intended
To
Supply needs.

But:

To
Restfully
Arrive to a
Visit
Even on
Lengthy trips.

Kits of gifts
Inescapably
Truly
Show you care!

I think it's a great description!

Although most of the pictures show travel kits made more suitable for cars, the author does explain how to make them for other means of traveling, such as plane travel. So this book will work well with any type of traveling you have coming up in your future.

There were a couple of gifts recommended that I thought were a bit odd for traveling (like gift certificates) but I thought they would be great for Christmas, birthdays or any other gift giving opportunity. Shortly after thinking this I found that the author, Donna Rees, also had several personal stories of travel kits she had given in the past for other occasions. Perfect!

The last chapter of the book includes links to great sites on traveling and a list of links to the official tourism site for all 50 states. In addition, there is a bonus section that includes tips on preparing your vehicle for travel and tips from other travelers.

The end of the book includes a list of some books the author recommends that you could purchase for your travel kit. The books are listed by age group (3-8, 8-12 and 12-adult).

At this point, you may be thinking this book is for travel kits for children only, however, there are ideas for high schoolers, moms, dads and ideas for the whole family to enjoy together.

I will definitely be pulling this book out before our next big trip as a family!

cost: $12.45

To purchase this product go here. To see what others had to say about it, go here.

(Disclaimer: This e-book was given to me for free in exchange for my honest review about the book. No other compensation was given.)

TOS review: When I Grow Up, I Wanna Be A Firefighter

Our next item up for review was in the TOS "When I Grow Up, I Wanna Be..." series. It was about firefighters. Here is the link to this book. The cost is $8.95 and it is recommended for ages 4-10.

For the most part, I enjoyed this e-book. I appreciated that it wasn't just the basic learning about fire trucks and what a firefighter does when he's not fighting fires. There was a history of firefighting, information about salaries and building codes and even a fun section on robotics. The book was written from the viewpoint of a firefighter and there is a section called "My Life as a Firefighter."

There were worksheets (one about math, a crossword puzzle, a fill in the blank story and a few other things), coloring sheets, copywork, and vocabulary, so you could use this as a short unit study. In the robotics section, there is a project for building your own model arm that looks very cool! For our family, we chose to skip most of the worksheets. Nathan did ask me to print out the crossword puzzle and word seek as he enjoys doing those.

Nathan enjoyed the book and asked me to keep reading. Alex kept asking me "can that be all we read" until we got to the part about dogs and firefighting. Since she is a pet lover, that interested her! I do think that a child interested in firefighting would enjoy this ebook and I liked that there was stuff in it that you don't always see in a kids book about firefighters.

I would recommend this for anyone with a child who loves anything about firefighting, though I would like to see the cost about a dollar or two less.

(originally posted in Feb.)

TOS Review: Download 'N Go Expedition Australia

I am excited to have the opportunity to try out for the TOS homeschool crew. I received a download for Expedition Australia by Amanda Bennett and the Old Schoolhouse to review. This study is recommended for grades K-4th.

This is written to be a 5 day study about Australia. The days are set up as follows:

Day 1: Where on Earth is Australia?
Day 2: Some of the Special Places in Australia
Day 3: A Bit of Australian History
Day 4: Cool Things to Know About Australia
Day 5: Fun and Games in Australia

Each day contains links to pertinent information, printouts to assemble a lapbook, suggestions of other books to read, printouts, a geographic feature of the day which allows some drawing creativity, information on Australian words and animals and other helpful information.

This complete unit study is well written and easy to follow. I was able to just take a short time looking through the day’s activities, pick what I wanted our family to do, and follow a few links. There were some activities I skipped that would have been great to use for Kindergarten and First Graders. It took me less than 10 minutes to do this and print out the pages I wanted my kids to use. The printouts are in color, though I think you could print most of them on a black and white printer though you would miss out on some of the beauty of some of the pictures.

The kids and I sat down and followed the links in the packet. We also worked on the lapbook portion and some of the other worksheets. It was fun to do with the kids and it wasn’t hard to get them to work on the printouts. There was no complaining. Their favorite thing to do so far, has been an online scavenger hunt.

One downside to this packet was that although there were elements to make a lapbook and there were links to what lapbooks were, there wasn’t a diagram or picture of how to assemble the lapbook for this specific unit, nor did it tell us how many folders are recommended to use for the lapbook. Therefore, we will have to wait until we have all the pieces ready and then figure out how to put them in our folder or folders.

I confess when I first saw that this was an Amanda Bennett study, I was apprehensive. I remember looking through an Amanda Bennett Unit Study years ago and remember it basically being an outline of what to study without additional information. It wasn’t something that fit us at the time. However, I liked this Australian Expedition download and even spent some time looking through other downloads offered in this series. I would definitely purchase another item if it fits what we are studying. The cost of $7.95 is worth it.

Click here for the link for this study. You can see other products they offer as well.

Also, if you are interested in trying out for the Homeschool Crew also, click on the link in my first paragraph.

(originally posted in Feb.)