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ROBOTS-4-U

Posted by html404 on March 26, 2015
in Education, Fun Stuff, Gift Ideas, Kids Stuff, Parenting, School, Seasonal Stuff, Techie Stuff, Technology/Electronics, Things to Do in Chicago, Uncategorized

Are you looking for educational activities for your children this summer? Look no further. See what ROBOTS-4-U and Dynamic Art Design have to offer:

S.T.E.A.M. Education: Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math!

Campers having a BLAST, while learning and playing in a dynamic environment. Learning about Robotics and Science, in an independent and exciting way!

– Robot / Science / Engineering / Day Camp / Challenges

– Camps Girls and Boys – Aged 7 to 14

– Robot Camps and Dynamic Art Camps offered during June, July and August

– Hands on Learning, Self-Paced. Beginners to Expert!

KEY INFORMATION

– 1 week (5 days) long

– Days: Monday to Friday Times: 9:00-11:30a.m. and 12:30-3:00 p.m.

– CAMPERS RATIO: 1 Instructor to 16 participants

-Register early as camps do fill up quickly!

– Each Camper Individually uses a ROBOTICS or DYNAMIC ART Kit. Robot kits do not go home with campers but are available for purchase!

Visit www.ROBOTS-4-U.com and www.dynamic-art-design.com to see dates and locations for these day camps.

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Back to College with the Lowest Priced Unlimited Plans

Posted by html404 on September 2, 2014
in Education, Gift Ideas, Parenting, Saving Money, School, Technology/Electronics, Uncategorized

I have mentioned before that our oldest daughter heads off to college in less than a year. #Phones4School #CollectiveBias. One of the things on our to-do list is to research cheap wireless plans. We desire to get her set up with a technological life line a.k.a a cell phone when she is away from home. A cell phone will enable her to communicate when she’s out, give her a life line if she gets stranded or if, God forbid, she runs into trouble. We also want her to have a phone for when she starts driving by herself in a few months.

My daughter was away at her cousin’s house all weekend. It was fun to surprise her with a trip to the store to buy her an early college present. We purchased Alcatel One Touch Fierce ($99.88) for $34.88/month, an unlimited talk text and data/web plan with Walmart’s Family Mobile (T-Mobile is the carrier), plus $25 for the starter kit. We love the unlimited aspect of this plan. It is also affordable for a college student on a limited budget. Bobbie is already figuring on paying for her phone herself. Of course, we are not complaining!

On the way home in the car she was setting up her calendar, which she is going to need to keep track of classes, assignments, exams and activities while she is away in college. She is obviously very excited to have her own smart phone! Other features she likes are the graphics. She is also looking for apps for homework, budgeting and exercising. She is having fun learning her way around her new phone.

The Alcatel One Touch Phone is perfect for college students because it is not only portable but it is a smart phone with all the bells an whistles – talk, text, web/data, 4G capability, camera and a 4.5″ touch screen. The monthly plans are budget friendly for both students and families.

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Back to School with CampusBookRentals.com

Posted by html404 on August 26, 2014
in Books, Deals, Education, Giving Back/Charity, Saving Money, School, Uncategorized

Back to School with CampusBookRentals.com

Are you headed back to college or know of someone who is? College students should know about the perks of renting textbooks from CampusBookRentals.com I am sure my daughter will want to look into this for next year when she goes off to college.

Here are some perks:

-Save 40-90% off of bookstore prices

-Free shipping both ways

-Can highlight in the textbooks

-Flexible renting periods

-They donate to Operation Smile with each textbook rented

-Live customer support

….and so much more.

CampusBookRentals.com RentBack Program

CampusBookRentals.com started a new program, RentBack. RentBack is new initiative that allows students to rent the textbooks they own – to other students… which is an awesome opportunity for them to make 2-4x more money compared to what they’d make through buyback options! Buyback is selling their books back at the end of the semester.

Isn’t that a great idea?! Check out this CampusBookRentals.com RentBack video:

This is a featured post.

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Best Colleges 2014 Book

Posted by html404 on April 14, 2014
in Books, Education, Homeschooling, Money & Finances, Parenting, School, Uncategorized

This is a sponsored post.

I am entering a new phase of parenting in that I have a child looking at colleges! Very weird for me! Bobbie is doing all the research for college requirements, SATs, applications, etc. U.S. News & World Report provides college rankings every year. I thought their new Best Colleges 2014 book would be helpful to my daughter as she narrows down her college choices.

About Best Colleges 2014

Here are four things Bobbie took from the book and the rest of the post is basically written by her, not me:

• It provides information on colleges all across the United States for students of all backgrounds and interests.

• Gives advice for students who don’t have straight A’s and encouragement and support for getting into college.

• Provides a checklist for preparing for college, which she thought was really helpful.

• It offers information on everything from the application process, getting financial aid, to finding the right school.

Best Colleges 2014 was very helpful and gives you a good idea of what you need to do to prepare for college, as well as offering encouragement and advice from high school students who have already gone through the college process.

The checklist provides a detailed step-by-step list of everything you need to do starting at 9th grade and ending with acceptance into college.

They didn’t limit the advice to students seeking to gain entrance to an Ivy League college; they had several sections dedicated to helping B- students get into a great college.

The sections on gaining financial aid were incredibly helpful and something we definitely need help with in knowing how to apply for the different financial help available to us.

If you would like to pick up a copy of Best Colleges 2014 , use the following code SCHOOL25 to receive a discount!

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Lola’s Math Train 2 App Review

Posted by Brande on February 18, 2014
in Apps, Education, Fun Stuff, Reviews, School, Techie Stuff, Uncategorized

$math Train$ Choo Choo Coming through with a new app just for you!

Lola the panda bear greats you at the train. All Aboard!

There are 3 difficulty levels – Easy, 2 (Medium), and 3 (Hard). With 15 different math games!

$Math train 2$
The Easy & Level 2 I found to be very similar, the numbers math problems are a little harder. This level has adding, arrange numbers smallest to biggest, how many more apples are in this box than the other.
Level 3 takes you to subtraction and harder problems like which number is missing, and the start of multiplication. $Math Train 3$
Once you finish a few problems you can pick out an outfit for one of your riders on Lola’s Math Train. Lola’s train will then give you a score at the end.

$Math train 4$

I love the progress tracker! It’s on the welcome page in the lower left corner. Once there you can enter your email address and it will email you the progress of your child.
This app is available for Apple products as well as Android!

Lola’s Math Train is recommended for ages 3 to 6.

I did find that the easy level was a little hard for my daughter. She is 5, I expected it to be 5 + 1 type of games, but it was more like 10 + 20 which I found to be a bit advanced for her. Otherwise, this will be a great app in future.

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Save Money on College Textbooks this Semester!

Posted by Bobbie Gould on February 9, 2014
in Deals, School

The new semester of school has begun and the holidays are over, if you’re a student (or a parent of a student) then you know exactly how expensive textbooks are. With tuition, supplies, extra fees, board, and textbooks most students and parents of students are always looking for ways to save money.

CampusBookRentals.com is a textbook rental company that allows students to not spend hundreds of dollars on textbooks that they’ll only use once. I’ve been looking at colleges lately, and the amount of money that textbooks cost alone would break my wallet.

With free shipping both ways, the ability to highlight the rented textbooks, live customer support, and rental periods that you can customize, they’re a great option for any student. I’m excited to see that more companies are being built that help students get a good education while saving money, instead of pushing them further into debt.

One thing that I love about Campus Book Rentals is that they are huge supporters of charity. They partnered with Operation Smile and are donating over 1,000 cleft lip surgeries to kids that are in need of surgery. Helping those in need is a huge passion of mine and I’m thrilled that such a great company is doing just that.

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Dabby Dill & The Hiccup Pickle iPad App Plus $50 iTunes Giveaway

Posted by html404 on January 30, 2014
in Apps, Downloads, Ebooks, Education, Fun Stuff, Giveaways, Homeschooling, Kids Stuff, Parenting, Reviews, School, Technology/Electronics, Uncategorized

This is a featured review.

Dabby Dill & The Hiccup Pickle iPad App Review

by Brande

Dabby Dill woke up in a Pickle, she had the hiccups! Follow Dabby on her journey to find the remedy for these hiccups. This book app is recommended for kids 4 to 8 years old. This iPad app requires a 6.1 operating system or later.

There are 4 modes in the book app.

Story Mode – You have a narrator reading to you and you touch the arrow for the next page.

Read Along – You narrator will read to you again. However this time each word is underlined as the narrator reads, helping your child as they read & follow along.

Self-Read – Your child will read by themselves. Allowing your child the freedom to read at their own pace.

Play Game – Great memory game! Follow the hiccup pattern with Dabby and her 3 friends. It’s very similar to the game Simon.

I found this book app very educational. My favorite is the read along. With the words underlined it really helps my daughter learn her words and vocabulary. I love each mode, this book app can grow with your child.

Click here to find Dabby Dill & The Pickle Hiccup in the iTunes store!

Dabby Dill & The Hiccup Pickle App Giveaway Plus $50 Giveaway

by Theresa

Five of you have the opportunity to win an iTunes’s code to download Dabby Dill & The Hiccup Pickle iPad app for free, plus each of you will also receive a $10 iTunes e-gift card with the app code! Enter to win below!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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GS Preschool Games for Android

Posted by html404 on January 3, 2014
in Apps, Downloads, Education, Entertainment, Family Stuff, Free Stuff, Fun Stuff, Homeschooling, Kids Stuff, Reviews, School, Technology/Electronics, Uncategorized

Most of you who are regular readers know nearly all the apps on my cell phone are educational. Our children love to go on my phone to play with the apps. They also love it when I change the apps by downloading new ones. GS Preschool Games for Android has a cool little app our children have been enjoying the past couple of days.

GS Preschool Games has ten different activities children can enjoy and learn from:

- Jigsaw puzzles
– Match the Objects
– Solve the Maze
– Memory
– Burst the Balloons, which teaches letters, numbers and colors
– Count the Objects
– Compare the Objects
– Find Odd Items
– Find the Correct Count
– Scratch the Pad to Paint – while doing this activity our three year old son passed me the phone and said, “Scratch Mommy”….it took me a minute to figure out what he meant!

The characters are whimsical and fun. Not to mention attractive to a little one’s eye, as the colors are bright.

GS Preschool Games app is easy to use. Simply choose your activity with a click and then swipe and click to play. The skip button allows children to skip and choose a game based on his or her interest at that moment.

One thing I noticed while doing the balloon activity is when you earn your sticker for clicking the correct balloon, the pop up has this pause and there is barely enough time to catch the rest of the balloons as they float up and off the screen.

Even our five year old and seven year old had fun with this app. The app is recommended for ages 3-6. My daughter who is seven said it was fun and it has rewards. They love earning something for their effort. It’s very motivating for them as they learn and play. However, we could not figure out if the stickers led to more activities or bonus features or if they were just a reward pop up with an encouraging word. We are inclined to think it’s the latter. After a few activities within a game they do get to choose their own animal sticker reward.

Each game contains approximately 16+ individual exercises within that category, providing ample fun and entertainment for children at home or on the go. One thing to be aware of is a parent does have to be involved and read the instructions to a child who does not yet know how to read.

This app is available for yours and your child’s educational pleasure for Android here:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.greysprings.games

and is also available for iOS as well:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gs-preschool-games/id726944785?mt=8

Enjoy!

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Chicago Field Museum: 1893 World’s Fair Exhibit

Posted by html404 on November 21, 2013
in Education, Family Stuff, Fun Stuff, Homeschooling, School, Things to Do in Chicago, Travel, Uncategorized

My husband is a history buff and he has passed on his love of history to our children. We love visiting museums. Last weekend we went to the Chicago Field Museum to visit the 1893 World’s Fair Exhibit, which will be here in Chicago until early next fall. We took advantage of one their free admissions day knowing we’d have to purchase a Discovery Pass for the Fair exhibit.

Those of you who live in the Chicago area you may be interested in knowing upcoming free admissions days at The Field Museum:

December 2
December 5
December 9
December 10
December 11

For all the storms Illinois experienced last weekend, it did not deter people from venturing out in the cold and rain to visit The Field Museum.

What is the 1893 World’s Fair Exhibit about?

The Field Museum was born out of the 1893 World’s Fair and belongs to the people and the history of Chicago. The World’s Fair exhibit are all original collections that were all displayed at the Fair and is the single largest collection of items displayed at the Fair. The truth is, The Field Museum is the legacy of the Fair; scientists conduct ground-breaking research on the ever-growing collections.

The Field Museum Tours App

The Field Museum Tours App is available to help visitors with their tour. We had downloaded the app before we got to the museum so all we had to do was connect to “FieldMuseumWiFi” upon arriving. You can download the Field Museum Tours App too. The Wonders of the 1893 World’s Fair takes visitors back to that time in history, to the World’s Columbian Exposition – one of the greatest events in the history of Chicago. The exhibit shows visitors what visitors back then saw at the Fair 120 years ago.

The app is informative as you can see from the following screen shots.

What did we see?

We saw more than 200 artifacts and specimens from the the Fair’s ground.

We find it interesting to learn about different aspects and cultures in history. It’s amazing what you can learn! Below is a photo of a small stuffed female lion, but there was also a stuffed male lion as well. One of our sons loves lions so he was interested in this display. He was also interested in the tigers and seeing inside the mummy. There were over 20 mummies! All the children thought the pyramid was really cool to go inside!

The children thought the computer from the World Fair looked like the computer from the show S.H.I.E.L.D Agents. They thought that was really cool too.

Another cool thing they liked was the DNA lab.

Below you can see in the display cases a trench drum/log drum and behind them on hanging from the ceiling was an octopus! (Pictured in a photo below in the photo with our children)

There was an Inuit display from a group of Inuits who came to the Fair from Labrador (Canada).

There was an Inca Active Instruments display that had a simulator allowing us to play the instruments. We found that pretty interesting.

Our daughter B was quite interested in the oils and herbs displayed in their original bottles. All from different countries around the world. Her words, “It was amazing! To see Frankincense and Myrrh from all around the world.” None of any of these items have been displayed since the 1893 World’s Fair.

Here is a stuffed Indian elephant with a giant octopus hanging over our children.

This last photo is a from a slideshow or video footage.

The 1893 World’s Fair Exhibit was an incredible learning experience and we hope we can go back again before September 7, 2014.

I was selected for this opportunity by Clever Girls Collective, however all content and opinions expressed here are my own.

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InnoTab® 3S Learning Tablet Review and Giveaway

Posted by html404 on October 11, 2013
in Downloads, Ebooks, Education, Fun Stuff, Gift Ideas, Kids Stuff, Kids Toys, Reviews, School, Techie Stuff, Technology/Electronics, Uncategorized

Faith and Family Reviews received the following product from Vtech in exchange for writing a review. While we consider it a privilege to receive products to review, our reviews are our honest opinion and thoughts of the product.

It is pretty safe to admit our family has embraced the age of technology. While we don’t have every techie gadget on the market we have our share. More and more of our children’s education is relying on technology. That’s why we embraced the opportunity to review a Vtech InnoTab® 3S Learning Tablet

Features of the InnoTab® 3S Learning Tablet:

The InnoTab® 3S features VTech Kid Connect– an exclusive communication app that allows kids to be connected with their parents and friends through both tablet-to-mobileand tablet-to-tablet communication
The new 3S comes with a rechargeable battery pack with AC adapter and a kid-safe web browser
The new InnoTab 3S continues to provide access to VTech’s Learning Lodge™ app store, plus it comes packed with 20 free apps
Ages 3-9
All for under $100

InnoTab 3S Learning Tablet Review

Our children love their new InnoTab® 3S Learning Tablet. We are still learning to use all the features. They haven’t text me yet and they really haven’t used the web browser much because it requires me to put in our network password. I think it would be nice if we could save that password just because it would be easier than logging in every time, but I understand that this is one of the safe browsing features. I like that we can add new websites under the parental controls.

I know the camera and video camera gets used a fair amount. The children have fun taking goofy photos or videos or practicing their photography.

The children’s favorite activities is to play the beanstalk game. They have to check their bean plants every day to care for them or else they die. Kind of helps teach responsibility. The children love to see how much their beans have grown day by day.

InnoTab 3S Learning Tablet Downloads

Though there were free downloads with the InnoTab 3S Learning Tablet, I did purchase a few more for the children just so I could understand the selection, purchasing and download process. It was pretty painless and easy. Similar to downloading apps to a cell phone. Edited 12/27/13: But in comparison, there are more free apps available for other tablets, which I did not realize until much later. It is costly to buy more apps, something I cannot seem myself doing much of now that we have a Kindle Fire.

The Learning Lodge is where parents and children can access “hundreds of engaging, age-appropriate games, videos, e-books and music, endorsed by VTech’s team of educational experts”. Word has it the Learning Lodge will expand its current library of 350 titles to over 600 titles by the end of the year.

I did find the InnoTab 3S Learning Tablet a little slow when changing screens, but overall I really like its features and having this as an addition to our children’s educational program, even our big kids (ages 10-14) like to use it!

Vtech InnoTab® 3S Learning Tablet Giveaway

One of you has the chance to win a Vtech InnoTab 3S Learning Tablet by entering below!

a Rafflecopter giveaway