Crew Review: See the Light

All my kids like art, but MiniMe is my "ARTIST". She loves all things-art. When See the Light came up as a possibility to review, I knew she'd be over-the-moon! I also realized that I actually already had 2 of their videos that I'd won in various blog giveaways (or something) and we'd never used. The "downside" of reviewing so many great products is that we have less time to pursue non-review-item interests so they often get pushed aside.  So . . . to help decide which product we wanted to review, we watched, The Crossmaker one of the videos we already have. The girls were SOOO excited about it after watching that video. Since we already have God's Runaway, we decided to request Shipwrecked for this review.

While we waited for the video to come, we went shopping for art supplies from the list on the website. But there were a couple items I wasn't sure about so once we got the video, we watched it, including the art lessons before I went back to the craft store. That cleared up my questions, made me realize that my original plan, to have the girls share one set of art supplies wasn't practical, AND (we found out later) the girls watching it all the way through helped make the actual art project go more smoothly when we got to the art projects.

Since the suggested age range for this video is 3+ for the story and 6+ for the art lessons, we invited our neighbors, J (age 3) and E (age 6) to join us.

We all settled in to watch the story. It held everyone's attention, even J and Little Bit! For this video, the story portion tells the story of Paul's shipwreck from the point of view of a boy on the ship. The pictures to go with the story are artwork done by the See the Light artists.

After we'd watched the video, we set Sassy, MiniMe and E up at the table in front of the TV to do the first art lesson. Meanwhile we set J and Little Bit up at a card table nearby with watercolors to do do their own thing :).

The first art lesson we chose to do was watercolors. One thing we noticed, especially since E was joining in without pre-watching the video like the girls had done, is that there are times when the art instructor says things in the "wrong order" since the video is designed for the student to follow along.  For example, the instructor tells you to add a yellow boat to the picture. E decided he wanted his boat to be orange, not yellow, and starts painting. THEN the instructor explains why you want to use yellow. Obviously, as an adult, I would probably realize that there must be a reason to make the boat yellow, and either go with it, or wait and listen abit longer before I started painting. BUT since this is designed for children E's age to follow, I think it would be helpful if the instructors explained things THEN told the children what to do.  This is easy to work around, however, by pre-watching the video (since E's at the bottom age of the suggested age, and an active little boy, I suspect that he wouldn't stay "tuned in" if he were to pre-watch it, but if your child falls into that category you can pre-watch and then help the child remember to wait before they change things up.)

The really super cool thing about See the Light is that when you're done, the pictures GLOW!!! I wasn't able to find a black light locally, so I ordered one from See the Light. The day it came ( a couple days after the kids painted their lighthouse pictures) I realized that our house has windows in EVERY. SINGLE. ROOM!!! Nice big windows in the bathroom, a window in the pantry, closets don't have doors . . . even the basement has windows. I finally figured out that we could go, a couple people at a time, into the storage space in the eaves upstairs, and that is dark enough to test out the black light. It is VERY COOL!!! And it's just using the Crayola Extreme Color pencils and crayons that you can find in any craft store! I didn't try to take a picture of the black light, but the picture below shows our first art day's masterpieces. Little Bit and J's "paintings" are the scribbley ones, but as you can see, the lighthouse pictures turned out nicely!

Over the next couple of weeks, on rainy days (because it's spring, and we spend as much time as possible outside) the 3 kids also did the creative lettering art lesson and the chalk pastels lesson. Our one disappointment was that we couldn't get the chalk pastels to glow in the blacklight, even with using flourescent chalk pastels that we purchased from See the Light.  The picture is still cool, and the children still learn great chalk pastel techniques, it was just disappointing that they didn't glow.

I didn't think to ask E what he thought (the proof will be when we ask if he wants to join us for the other videos we have), but the girls LOVED this video!! They are anxious to do the other 2 videos we have, and we will, we're just waiting for more rainy days LOL.  The girls are already asking if we can get the rest of the Bible story DVDs and THEN move on to the art lessons :) If you're looking for art videos, AND some nice Bible stories as well, this is a great choice!

The video is $14.99, or you can purchase all 5 Bible story DVDs for $74.95

To see what fellow crew mates thought of this, and other See the Light videos, click the banner below.