If you noticed it was a little quiet around here, we just got a fairly direct hit from record-breaking hurricane Michael last week. We came through mostly unscathed, but it knocked our phone lines and power out for a bit. To get an idea of the aftermath imagine if a third of the trees in your city along with telephone poles and light poles came down one night. That’s about how the city is looking still. Case in point, Timberdoodle sent us a really cool product to review right in the middle of the hurricane. USPS dropped it off a week late to my door looking like this.
Luckily Timberdoodle is extremely diligent when shipping their products — and kind of like how our home survived while the rest of our city got tossed around — the shrink-wrapped item inside this box surprisingly survived.
So 1) Our family is doing well but backtracking with homeschool and life in general (therefore no week-in-review posts as of late).
2) Instead I have a review of a product I think is so cool and so Montessori-ish. Montessorish. Montessori-y. Never-mind.
What I mean is this product hits all my criteria for a great homeschool material: it’s inviting, hands-on and interesting, has a control of error, is self-correcting, and can be done independently. Wins all around for Color Fold offered by Timberdoodle.
Color Fold
The material comes with a sturdy cloth square and a selection of puzzle challenge cards ranging from beginner to expert, handily color-coded by level.
Color Fold is a challenging logic activity best suited to ages 8 and up. The idea is fold the cloth to show only the color squares featured on the front of the challenge card. You can fold backwards or forwards, but it must be cleanly done along a line.
I had my bright 8-year-old give the beginner puzzle cards a try, and while she found them tricky, she could solve them independently. Later my extremely mechanically / math-minded hubby tried solving the most advanced levels, but he got stuck and gave up. Timberdoodle includes Color Fold in their 2018 Eleventh-Grade Curriculum package; it’s well-placed there. But with so many levels to attempt, Color Fold works for many ages and abilities — if you’re looking to strengthen logic and spatial skills it is all-around excellent.
As I said before, it’s self-correcting. If you do get stuck, you can flip the card over for the solution.
All in all Color Fold is a fun challenge and worth picking up! You may not even be able to put it down. Can your kids out-fold you? Bet mine can, but I won’t give them the satisfaction of knowing it. Our secret. Maybe I need to practice with this on my own. 😉
Again you can find Color Fold through Timberdoodle either as part of their Eleventh-grade curriculum or as a stand-alone product. While the product was given to us to review for free, all opinions are my own.
That looks very cool!