Most of my faithful followers have seen that I am going to sunset Creative K Kids in the fall. I do not have the time I used to have to make it a business; and therefore, I would have to put my family’s money into all of the expenses of hosting and maintaining a website.
A fun perk to blogging about my kids and fun kids’ activities was the ability to review new items for free. I only asked for items that I was interested in reviewing and I only gave my honest opinion of those items. In the past couple of years, I have not done as many sponsored posts as I used to do. I mainly worked with a couple of publishing companies that sent me books to review. Since I am a book-lover, that was a perfect fit for me. I am hoping that a couple of those companies will continue to send me items and that I can share my reviews on Creative K Kids’ Facebook page and Instagram page and possibly on Pinterest or Amazon. We shall see!
Recently, I have received items from two different companies. All of these would be great items to get your kids to encourage your children to get off devices and be creative and active this summer!
The first item I received was The Magne Darts by Stomp Rocket.
It is a magnetic dartboard! There are green and red magnetic darts so that 2 people can compete against each other. Everyone can take part playing darts without fear of anyone getting hurt! Or you can set this up in a kid-safe area and let the kids compete in playing darts safely while the adults compete with real darts.
We tried it out. It was so easy. We just removed a painting, hung this in its place, and started throwing the darts. They stuck! I will probably add this to our church’s fun fair game stash as it would be easy to set this up as one of the games the kids play.
Can you believe that my son actually played this–and I didn’t take pictures while he did it? We’ll have to set it back up when we come back from vacation.
I received several items from the Quarto Kids STEAM Club.
One item that would be a great summer activity was a kit called Ice Dyeing: The Coolest Tie-Dye Hit. This kit comes with everything essential to do ice dyeing except ice. It also said soda ash was optional but explained why we may want to purchase it.
Last year, our tiny school did a onsite science field trip. I am saving this kit for another science day this year. We may do t-shirts, but the kids wouldn’t get the final product for a day or two. The book that is included in the kit shows how to use a color wheel in choosing what colors you want to use. What I really like for our science experiment day is that the book includes a few color experiments you can do on paper and cloth and see immediate results. Although doing a ice dye t-shirt would be fun for the kids to keep and remember our science day, they could also do 1-2 short experiments right away that demonstrates visually different color concepts.
From Quarto Kids STEAM Club, I also asked to get two books about the ocean and sharks. I teach one girl who wants to be a marine biologist and work with sharks when she grows up, so I knew she would love to look at these books.
One is called The Deep Blue and each page takes you on an exploration of the earth’s oceans with beautiful pictures on the pages surrounding and behind the text. You can see pictures of a few of the pages inside the book HERE.
The other book is called Are You Smarter Than a Shark? This book is filled with interesting facts about sharks and presented in a fun and easy-to-understand format. You can see a few pictures from the inside of the book HERE.
A great summer project for the kids would be for them to plant and maintain a garden. Quarto Kids STEAM Club included the book Stanley Jr. Gardening is Awesome: Projects, Advice & Insight for Young Gardeners.
This book includes chapters on garden essentials, choosing your plants, gardening how-tos, great bed gardens, container gardening, and raised bed gardening. It tells you how to build different kinds of gardens (such as raised beds), how to compost, and more! I think this would be a great book for first-time adult gardeners as it is not as complex as some gardening books yet it is not super simplistic either. It gives you what you need to begin gardening without making it overwhelming. You can see several of the pages that are inside the book HERE.
If your child is artsy or likes to draw, then a book you may consider getting him/her for some summer fun is Drawing Workshop for Kids.
This book is meant to be done with an adult and child together. It could be done either as a parent, grandparent, or a babysitter with a child or it could be done in a group setting where an adult is working with a group of kids. It has a couple of pages at the very beginning that introduces different terms that will be used in the book. Then there are warm-up drawing activities as well as an explanation of why these activities should be done. The biggest portion of the book are the actual drawing workshops. You can see some of the pages that are inside the book HERE.
The last book that I received also from Quarto Kids STEAM Club is Biology for Kids.
This would also be a great book to help keep minds active this summer. This book has 25 illustrated biographies of well-known scientists. After the 1 page biography of each scientist is an experiment that demonstrates something that that scientist discovered or developed or became famous for in the world of science. Since I like history more than science, this helps science become even more interesting to me. I will look through this book more when I put together this years on-site science field trip. You can look at some of the pages that are inside the book HERE.
