HUGE Back to Homeschool Haul 2025 | Amazon School Supplies, Books, Curriculum & Games

Hey everybody, welcome to the Wild Hawk Way. I'm Jessica. Today's video is going to be a humongous back to homeschool haul. Before I show you all of the stuff, I need you to keep in mind that we homeschool in such a way that we use more resources than we do curriculum, meaning that we use books and games and activities as our curriculum, which is where a large part of my budget goes each and every homeschool year. And you obviously do not need all of the stuff that I'm gonna show you to homeschool well. You actually don't need anything. But this is what I purchased for our upcoming homeschool year. A lot of books, a lot of games and some activities. And so I thought I would share it with you guys. We are going to start with like the school supplies. I don't need a lot. I'm homeschooling one kid. She's going into eighth grade. We have really great quality art supplies. What we actually need to buy each and every year has dwindled every year because again, one kid, the box of crayons that I bought lasts forever. The alcohol markers last forever. So the few things that I did actually need to purchase were some new pencils for her. And we prefer the larger like 0.9 millimeter lead. So I decided to get these big ones to try out. I also grabbed a set of my favorite erasable pens. This is the fine liner friction. I only needed the base colors this time because I still have a lot of the other colors. These are the ones I use the most. I also grabbed a set of my favorite highlighters, which is the mild liners. A box of gel pens. These are just black gel pens. They're mine and Emily's favorite, mainly because of how large the actual pen itself is. We like a rounder, like fatter barrel pen. So box of 12 of those. My favorite post-it tabs. Still have quite a few of these, but I knew I needed to grab at least one because Emily will steal them. And then I went ahead and also got a 50 pack of the HP Sprocket paper format printer. So that is like the basic back-to-school supplies that we purchased. I'm gonna just dive into books. This is kind of like more school type of books. We have the 52 Modern Manners for Teens, volume one and two. I have Five Facts a Day Science. This is something we'll be adding to our basket time, which I will be sharing with you guys next week. The thing about this particular book that made me so happy is that each day, the facts are like themed. So you can see here that this is five facts all about snakes. This is five facts all about inside the earth. You guys know I love a good theme. And I really love the little like snippets of facts, but when there are five random facts about five different things, it hurts my brain. And it doesn't hurt Emily's brain, but she thinks in themes like I do. So I think this is gonna be a really fun way to sneak in some science and stick like to a theme each day. So super excited for that one. And then another thing we're gonna be adding to our morning time or basket time that I did specifically for Emily is An Animal a Day. So it will have a different animal for us to talk about each day. And I liked it because it's just a little snippet, but then it still also has like the scientific name. It's group, it's height, weight, diet, location, status. So it has a little bit of fact, and then it'll give her a little bit more information. And then if she wants, she can go down a rabbit trail with that. Let's see, I also have a stack here that we'll be adding kind of to our language arts smorgasbord of stuff. We have Breakfast on Mars. This is 37 essays. So that way we can talk about different ways to write an essay. It doesn't have to be boring. Why do we say that? This is like 440 different idioms, phrases, sayings, and facts. I like this because they each have a picture and it has a little bit more information about it. We've done different idiom books, but I thought this one seems like really comprehensive since there was 440. I'm not sure what my plan is. We may just reference it as the sayings come up. Emily's very literal, so figure of language is kind of difficult for her. I've also debated putting it in our basket time and just doing one a day. We'll see what I end up doing with that. I also got Help, My Kid Hates Writing. I am planning to read this myself. And then I'm really excited for this one. It's called Mightier Than the Sword. Sorry, Mightier Than the Sword. Recently, in like the last six to eight months, Emily is showing interest in possibly pursuing writing of some kind as a career. So I thought this book would be kind of fun for her because it's rebels, reformers, and revolutionaries who changed the world through writing. And after you've read about them, like here's one for example. Once you've read about them, there's also some like kind of writing. I hate to say the word prompts, but there's like ways that you can write. So this one, for example, they're talking about Japanese forms of poetry. And then it gives you an example of how you could basically write your own like that. I did also get the new SAT Vocabulary Workbook. I haven't looked through this enough to know yet, but I think we are probably going to do this aloud. Like we will just go through the lessons and talk about the words as if they were flashcards. There is an activity at the bottom of all of the pages. Here, I'll show you for example. I'm just not sure that we'll do it quite that way. I think we're gonna use it more like flashcards and maybe just do the activities aloud. Like I'll ask her the questions like it's comprehension. I was kind of debating on putting this in our basket time too. We will see it is, what does it say? 700 high-frequency words. So I figure that's, I'm not sure. I think there was like 145 lessons. So that could be a lesson a day or we could loop through it. Stay tuned. I will have my basket time figured out next week when I share it with you guys. Also for me to kind of read and reference, I grabbed the Writing Revolution 2.0. And then I have a small stack of personal growth development type books. These are non-fiction books. I had shared that our one thing for this year was gonna be mindset. I'm actually gonna do a whole video on this specifically, but these are some of the books that I bought to kind of go in with that topic. We have Eat That Frog for Students. Brave, A Teen Girl's Guide to Beating Worry and Anxiety. How to Influence People and Win Friends. And this one is for teen girls. How Teens Win. Your New Playlist. What Color is Your Parachute for Teens. Rich Dad, Poor Dad for Teens. And A Teen's Guide to the Five Love Languages. Okay, we're gonna just keep on rolling with books here. Emily has recently become very, very interested in graphic novels, and we signed her up for the weekly graphic novel book club with Mary Hannah Wilson on OutSchool. She's very excited for that. So I purchased all of the graphic novels that she'll be doing with the book club, plus a few more that she had on her wishlist so that she has plenty to read from this year. So I'm just gonna start going through those stacks. It's a pretty large stack, so stick with me. The Secret of Ravens. Paws, Gabby Gets It Together. This is the first one, it's a series. Heidi. The Cartoonist Club. Treasure in the Lake. We Are Big Time. Swan Lake, The Quest for Kingdoms. The Moth Keeper. Mixed Up. Game Reveal. Oasis. Arusha, The End of Time. Secrets of Camp Whatever. Speechless. The Flamingo. Wild Heart, The Daring Adventures of John Muir. Speak Up, Santiago. Very Bad at Math. Smile. Last Kids Comic on Earth. Yummy, A History of Desserts. The 39 Clues. This is the Maze of Balls in So Book One. Almost Sunset. Besties, Prank War. The Night Librarian. And then these are some that she had wanted to try and so she picked her favorite of those. We have King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. The Three Musketeers. Around the World in 80 Days. Journey to the Center of the Earth. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The Odyssey. Robin Hood. And A Christmas Carol. And then the last three that we have are the Harback Graphic Novels 1, 2, and 3 of Dune. This was on her wish list so this is like her surprise back to school thing because it's more than I would typically have spent on a graphic novel for her. She really wanted the Harback editions of those so that is her like special thing for back to school. All right, we're gonna continue with books. I have just kind of a, this is a small stack of books that we will either read aloud or they are part of her teen book club because she's also doing the teen club that meets once a month with Mary Hannah Wilson so it's a mixture of ones that I picked that I was interested in reading aloud with her now that she's gotten a little bit older or they're from her teen book club. So some of these she may read by herself, some of them we'll read together. I think we're probably gonna read most of the teen book clubs together because of some of the content and the themes it's things that I would like to discuss and be able to have an open conversation. So keep that in mind when I show you guys these. We have The Outsiders. Michael Vey, The Prisoner of Cell 25. The Downstairs Girl. Skyward. Cinder. The Monster Missions. Black Horn Key. The Enigma Girls. Echo. Skype. The Maze Runner. And Maximum Ride. Now some of those are book series, I only bought the first one in the series of all of them other than Dune. If she's interested, if she likes them, we will obviously buy follow-ups to that. Okay, next I have kind of a stack of activities that I purchased for Kevin and Emily to do for STEAM. Most of these are younger than what she can handle. I mean, obviously she could do them all by herself, but the point of them doing STEAM together is for them to have like fun stuff. So most of the ones that I bought are ones that like they could build and then have fun doing like things against each other. You'll see what I mean. It's this Smartivity line. This one is mini football. So they build it and then they would be able to play against each other. We also have mini golf. Now technically that's only one player, but I figured they'll probably take turns and compete against each other. Foosball. Pinball. Mini tennis. Clash of the Cyborgs. Which, this reminds me of Rock'em Sock'em Robots, but they get to build it first, so I think that's pretty cool. And then Emily asked for two different Legos. This is part of her back to school gift too. We have the three-in-one creator dinosaur. And then the three-in-one creator, I'm gonna call it magical creatures because it does like a dragon and a phoenix. Okay, I think basically all we have left now is games. Kevin and Emily requested that we added a few more dice games to our game library because they love dice games. So I decided to add zombie dice and diced veggies. They both seem like really fun themes. I mean, who doesn't want to roll a brain? And this one you actually get this little mini cleaver that you play with. And so I knew Emily would love that. So that is for that purpose. I also wanted to add some new single player games to our game shelves, mainly because that's something that I like to strew a lot now that Emily's older, and I wanted to have new ones to strew. So I just grabbed a few. We have Canoodle Flip, which is 100 puzzles. Tower Stacks, that has 80 different challenges. I'll keep her busy for a while. And then Crash Cats, which has 60 different challenges. As soon as I was like looking through all of them and Emily saw it, she's like, I want that one, even though it's probably, I mean, it's eight plus. It's probably a tiny bit young for her, but it's gonna get logic in and it's something that will keep her busy while I need to do something else. So I'm all for it. I also grabbed a small stack of exit games. These are one to four players. So it's something I can strew and she could do by herself or it's something we can do together as a family. I pretty much bought all of the ones that were, you can see here, there's like a level. I bought all the ones that were two, just to get us started. So I have the Cursed Labyrinth, the Enchanted Forest, the Magical Academy, the Haunted Roller Coaster, the Stormy Flight, the Sunken Treasure, and the House of Riddles. She really enjoyed the escape room that we did for her birthday last year. So I thought these would just be a fun thing that I could strew. She could do it by herself, we could do it together as a family and it still has that like logic, making her work her brain kind of thing. So once we've gone through all of those, if she enjoys them, then I'll go ahead and try to look for the ones that are three on the difficulty and go from there. I also wanted to add some new two-player games to our stacks because there's a lot of times when Kevin needs to do something or I need to do something. And so having a lot of really good two-player games or a good assortment of two-player games means that one of us can still play with Emily. It's also really great for one-on-one time. And honestly, it's great for Kevin and I to be able to play games with each other as well. So since Emily is getting a little bit older, I wanted to add a few that were a little bit more advanced or even just fun. So I have Chipper, Splendor Duel. We love King of Tokyo, so I thought why not get King of Tokyo Duel? And then you guys know that we love the Genius games. We have Genius Square and Genius Star, and they are two of the ones that Emily and I play so many times so much because they just play really well. And technically they can be played by one player or two player, and so that's a win as well. So we got Genius Gyms. And then I also grabbed the Genius Connection. And this is like a simple game, but Emily and I have realized that sometimes simple games are fantastic to just leave on the table, and we can play them really, really quick. We've been getting into things like Connect Four, Battleship, some of those classics that we forgot how good they are because we own so many other different games. They're just great to leave on the table, and one of us or even a grandparent or just anybody who comes over can just pick up and play with her, spot it, blink, those kinds of things. It's just, we just love them because you don't really have to teach it. It's not long and drawn out. You can play them in less than 10 minutes, so it's a way to sneak in extra gameplay. So because of that, I went and searched to see what else I could find in that same kind of genre of games, and Guess Who was one that I was like, oh man, she would love that. Then I found Guess Who Harry Potter and Guess Who Marvel, and I knew she would love that even more. So I grabbed both of those. Just like I said, a fun, something that we can play just really quick one-on-one. I also wanted to add some more cooperative games. Most of the cooperative games that we have, I would say Emily's borderline growing out of age-wise, so I wanted to add some that we could play a little bit more now that she's older. The ones that we have that are our favorite are Forbidden Island and Pandemic. So I decided we would add Forbidden Jungle, which is another version of the Forbidden Island. And then Horrified. There's a couple of different options for this one, like different themes. We decided to try the Greek monsters theme because Emily is like really, really obsessed with mythology lately. In fact, that's what she wants to do almost for the entire school year this year if she has her way. So I decided we would get the Greek monsters to try out. If we enjoy it, I already have the original monsters on my list for October for Halloween because it's like Dracula and Frankenstein. I also decided to grab Mysterium. And then, I can't get there because there's so much stuff in the way. And then we just have a small stack of some educational games that I grabbed for us to add to our game shelves. One is Double Done 151. This is just a money and mayhem game for the whole family. We have Words Are Hard. So it is kind of a simple, you are laying down like a picture card and whoever can come up with another word that's not the picture you're looking at, but starts with the same letter as what you're looking at, you get to keep that card. So kind of a tongue twister vocabulary type of game. Super Trivia. This is 1,200 questions. It comes with a dice. I don't know how you're supposed to play this, but each card has six questions on it and it comes with a six-sided dice. I already decided as soon as I saw it. Like I said, no clue how you're supposed to play it, but the way we're gonna play it is we like to play Trivia over dinner. So we're gonna play it like you would almost like a Professor Noggin's card. We're gonna grab a card. Somebody's gonna roll a dice and then that's the question that you'll ask if they answer it right. They'll get to keep the card. Whoever has the most cards at the end of dinner wins that night's round. Again, sure, that's not how you're supposed to play it, but that's what we're intending to use that for. We have the History Trivia game. And then we also have, if I can do it without knocking everything over, the Traveling the World Board Game. We have the National Parks version of this and we are going to be doing some World Geography either this year or next year. And so I wanted to have the World one as well. So that is everything that we purchased for the upcoming homeschool year. Let me know down in the comments what the coolest thing that you saw was and also what you purchased for your back to homeschool.