Wikki Stix are just plain fun! What is it you ask? "Wikki Stix are made of hand-knitting yarn enhanced with a microcrystalline food-grade, non-toxic wax, the kind used in bubble gum and lipstick." They are "twistable, stickable, buildable, playable one-of-a-kind creatable!" And that is the truth! The folks at Wikki Stix sent a big package of their different products so we could see just how many different ways we could use them in the homeschool. We put them to the test and here are our results.

I host a co-op once a month here and the month these arrived, it just happened to be my turn to lead an educational craft. We had been studying California history and so I decided to use the Bulk Class Pack along with the Super Wikki Stix for the group of 13 students; ages ranging from 5 to 13. The Bulk Class Pack comes with an astonishing 600 Wikki Stix, a sturdy decoratable box, and a helpful 36-page Resource Guide filled with great ideas for Wikki use in every subject area. There are some wonderful samples of creations and uses on their website. Included in the guide is a map of the United States that you can copy for use in the classroom. I copied this for all the students and then gave each student a Super Wikki Stix to use to outline their own individual United States. Super Wikki Stix are three feet long so we had just enough left to make the outline of California. I then set them loose with the Classroom Pack of the 600 six-inch Wikki Stix, in a wide variety of colors, to design something that impressed them about California that we had covered over our time together. I made my own sample country page and I designed a redwood tree out of the Wikki Stix and labeled it with "California" in my own Wikki Stix cursive. They each made their own and they were all so wonderful and creative. I didn't limit them (and you can do that with the Classroom Pack) and the end results were fantastic!

We gave some of our extras to our neighbors with little ones (ages 1-5) and she came back asking where we had bought them because her children loved them so much. I happened to have some leftover Party Favor Packs and she was thrilled. The Party Favor Pack is a superb way to share something educational as well as just plain fun in our party bags for birthdays. Each of the 15 bagged packs come with 12 six-inch Wikki Stix and a paper dot-to-dot to use and outline.

A few of the other aspects of Wikki Stix that I really appreciate are that they can be used over and over as they are not permanently stickable. They also don't dry out or stick to things like glue, but instead stick only to other Wikki Stix. They are a quiet time, hands-on creative toy that you can use for a variety of school subjects (I especially liked the use of Wikki Stix in science diagrams and of course, map-making), take them to church, to a meeting where you need your young ones to be occupied, or help keep your toddlers happy while you work with older children. They really are a fantastic homeschool resource, affordable, and reusable. Great job, Wikki Stix folks!

Product Review by Kate Kessler, Product Reviews Manager, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, LLC, July, 2011