Cultural Education with Adventurous Mailbox

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while you know I’ve been searching for a good geography plan.  I’ve found a good plan for the general identification of terms and such, but not a good plan for cultural education.  And I think cultural education is very important in this day and age.

{Disclosure: I received a free copy of Adventurous  Mailbox and was compensated for my time, opinions are my own, for better or for worse}

 

The problem I’ve encountered with most cultural education

Most of the products and curriculum I looked at were busy work.  Cute worksheets, little puzzles, but it was fluff.  I wanted more.  A lot more.

 

Enter Adventurous Mailbox.

Adventurous Mailbox is literature based, they’re fun adventure books for kids.  Each one is set in a different country and they give you a nice feel for the country the book is set in.  It’s true cultural education (and I’ve been reading the insights they offer on their facebook feed for more insights).

 

Currently Adventurous Mailbox has one set of countries with 8 books in it.  We start in Europe, then fly off to Taiwan, and it just keeps going from there.  I’ve been intrigued scrolling through their instagram feed because they’re in Taiwan, so as we work our way through book 2 I’ve been able to show pictures of what it’s like there.

 

They’ve got plans for more books in the series, to eventually have 40 books.  I hope they keep going past 40 because my kids really enjoyed the adventures so far.  They think Crameye (the narrator of the story and “creator” of the workbooks) is hilarious.

 

But wait, there’s more cultural education beyond the books

Sorry, I just couldn’t resist being silly, but this is my daughter’s favorite part.  When you receive the books your child receives a personalized letter inviting them to a secret world online.  The Adventurous Mailbox has an online adventure zone.  You can read the character’s personal blogs.  They’ve put together a great collection of educational resources to learn about world culture, animals around the world, and more.  I love that I can trust every link on that site has been tested and will head to a child-safe zone.

One my daughter has spent hours on.

 

Picking your Adventurous Mailbox package

 

Like most products you can choose what works for you.

The base package is the books for $79 and the secret online adventure world (your kid gets a personally addressed letter with their own secret password, very cool and exciting).

You can also get the Teacher’s Lounge, a set of lesson plans to go along with the books for $20 more.  They are well worth picking up because of the extra fun it adds in (HINT: I’ve got a coupon at the end to receive this for free).  More on this in a just a second, to my mind it’s a sign of a good product when I’ve barely scratched the surface of the product when I’ve been using it for a month, and I’m 500 words in and I still have so much to say).

 

Other fun perks:  change the shipment to  monthly to spread out the mystery (this is an add-on because of the added shipping); personal writing assignments that could be published on their blog (I might go back and add this in for my daughter who recently discovered the writing bug); birthday postcards, AND extra log-ons.

 

Finally, they’re working on an ebook format to lower the cost.  I personally think the ebook would take away some of the fun of getting this box of books in the mail, but I can also see the argument of the cost savings.  Oh, and they’re working on adding in “cultural bling,” I want this option because it’d be great for Montessori continent boxes which have always intrigued me.

 

More on that Teacher’s Lounge and the extra cultural education it offers

That is the short version of all the lessons.  When you click on any of those orange bars it expands into a dazzling array of activities you can do.  So far we’ve completed the Getting Wordy activities.  Mainly only that because I didn’t want to overwhelm my boys who are kind of leery of writing.

That is my son’s look before he started actually reading the work.  Once he started reading the definitions (written by the main character) he started laughing.

In cause you can’t read the sentence it says: “I made her acquaintance when I was digging through the city dump looking for Christmas gifts.”

My kids think this is hilarious.  I’m no longer worried about the other assignments because they were asking to do more.  That’s what makes a homeschool Mom happy.  “Mom can you read us more of Crameye’s Adventures?”

They’re making jokes about the books and what the characters will do next.

 

Get your own copy of Adventurous Mailbox

Right now Adventurous Mailbox is offering $10 off the series AND access to the Teacher’s Lounge if you use the code HSadventure.  This is good through the end of June 2015.