Category: children

July 22, 2019

The Grown-Up’s Guide to Making Art with Kids

I love to draw and paint. As a child and into my teen years, it was a way to calm the storm and refocus. I could spend hours hunched over a water colour making sure each colour was perfect and the right amount of shading. I strongly believe that each child should be encouraged from a young age to paint, make a mess with markers and paints – it does so much for them!

About The Grown-Up’s Guide to Making Art with Kids

Make art and memories with the special kids in your life! Packed with how-to drawing and painting projects, creative prompts, and original crafting activities, The Grown-Up’s Guide to Making Art with Kids will inspire hours of creative fun together.

This book includes drawing and painting projects featuring popular, kid-friendly subjects—like dinosaurs, pets, flowers, and robots—that adults and kids can create together. Guided practice pages invite interactivity and allow children and adults to draw and paint the same subjects, side by side. The book’s artwork is colorful, approachable, and done using ordinary, easily available art tools, including markers, crayons, colored pencils, and acrylic paint.

In addition to drawing lessons, The Grown-Up’s Guide to Making Art with Kids also includes projects and ideas for using artwork created from the prompts in the book to make crafts, including a map, pop-up art, and paper dolls.

The Grown-Up’s Guide to Making Art with Kids teaches valuable drawing, painting, and crafting skills to both kids and adults; inspires creativity; and encourages family togetherness. What better way to avoid screen time than by drawing, painting, and creating together with your kids?

Our Thoughts

This fun book is a great resource for those who want to teach and create art with their child but just not quite where to start. I know for myself, I love to paint and draw but if you had to sit me down to teach my kids, I wouldn’t know where to start. I would just give them the pencils or paint!

The book starts off with a great introduction into the art world with a great reminder that you are learning to create with confidence and in a way that is fun and appealing to younger children. You will learn the basics of the art supplies that you should keep stocked (there is nothing worse then planning a craft and not to have everything on hand). You learn the basics of the colour wheel and how to make secondary, tertiary colours as well as mixing and tones.

The book follows the format of a tutorial, followed by a step by step project. The tutorials are incredibly easy to follow and really get you back to the basics. I had completely forgotten all of my initial drawing lessons when I was fourteen and you broken down figures and animals into basic shapes. A person would become a series of circles and ovals with lines. You would then move on to add detail and change these shapes but it is these initials shapes that help you create the overall picture. It is these basics that are a must for developing art skills later on in life. The follow up projects are very fun and Lee provides you with a wide variety of crafts that you can complete to keep your child entertained and having fun. The instructions are easy to follow and for the most part, you will have the majority of the supplies at home.

The book itself is large, with easy to follow instructions and child friendly font. While it is fun to work with your child on the activities, if they are adventurous and want to work on their own, they will have no problem (if they are a bit older) following the instructions. The book also has pages where you can practice what you are learning right there.

The Grown-Ups Guide to Making Art with Kids is an excellent tool for parents looking to help their child explore their creative side and encourage confidence in their artistic skills. A great addition to your family home craft library, especially during the summer months when kids can be spending too much time in front of the electronics.

You can purchase this book on Amazon and Indigo.

About the Author

Lee Foster-Wilson is an artist and a designer in Cornwall, England. She worked as a graphic designer before becoming a full-time artist with her own business called Bonbi Forest. Lee’s artworks and prints have been featured on Design Sponge and in Vogue, Good Housekeeping, Marie Claire, NYLON, and The Guardian. She is the author of Creative Marker Art and Beyond and The Grown-Up’s Guide to Making Art with Kids, both from Walter Foster Publishing. Learn more about Lee at www.bonbiforest.com.

Disclosure: I received a copy of this book in order to facilitate this review. All opinions expressed are my own.

July 10, 2019

Be a Bubble Master with Zing Bubbles This Summer

Last summer, Zing introduced the Glove-A-Bubbles, an amazing, new way for children to play and make bubbles. They were quite the hit! Making bubbles can be so much fun but for little ones it can become frustrating quickly if they don’t have the coordination and motor skills to use the traditional wand. That is why we loved Glove-A-Bubbles, it made life so much easier.

This summer Zing came back even bigger and better with two new products: the Big-A-Bubbles and the Wave-A-Bubbles. Both items are guaranteed to have you making incredible, large beautiful bubbles along with precious summer memories to stow away.

The Wave-A-Bubbles come in a pack of two gloves with its own solution. Your child can choose from four characters: mermaid, dinosaur, bird and frog. They are sold at Walmart and Mastermind and cost roughly $5.99 CDN.

The gloves are incredibly easy to use – you tear off the bottom part and slip the glove over your child’s hand. You dip the top part of the glove with the holes, which are kind of like fingers, into the bubble solution (you will have to help your child to ensure that they get enough solution on the gloves) and then you can wave, run and move your arms around to create many beautiful bubbles all at once. We poured the solution into a bowl first to make it easier to dip the gloves into and found this made a huge difference. We could not believe how many bubbles the gloves made all at once! They filled our front yard.

We then tested out the Big-A-Bubbles which make long, wide bubbles. The Big-A-Bubbles come in six different character gloves: lion, crocodile, pirate, shark, duck and bear. These are also sold at Walmart and Mastermind and cost roughly $2.99 CDN.

These gloves look confusing at first with the large string that loops between both sides of the glove. At first, we weren’t sure where to put our fingers but the top of the glove has two small slits in them that you slide your fingers into (we did the thumb on one side and then two fingers on the other side) in order to make the glove “flap”. You will likely have to help younger children slide their fingers into the glove but once in they will have no trouble figuring out how to use the glove. Again, we poured the solution into a bowl to make it easier for him to dip the glove into. Because of the shape of the glove and the thick string, they create the most beautiful, long bubbles. They were landing on the grass and not popping right away, we had such a blast creating these bubbles.

The Zing bubble line, Big-A-Bubbles, Wave-A-Bubbles, Glove-A-Bubbles, is an affordable, fun and creative way to keep your kids busy and having fun. We not only played with them in our own front yard but also brought them to soccer where they were a huge hit with the younger siblings. This is a definite must have summer time item you need to keep in stock.

Make sure to follow Zing Toys on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to keep up to date with the newest products.

Disclosure: I received the above mentioned products in order to facilitate this review. All opinions expressed are my own.

July 3, 2019

My Kindergarten in 100 Words Review

Preparing for kindergarten is an exciting and scary time in your child’s life (as well as yours!), introduce them to common words and values that they will be exposed to as they start their educational journey.

About My Kindergarten in 100 Words

My Kindergarten in 100 words introduces a range of different scenes and objects, such as getting dressed and eating breakfast with the family to different activities at kindergarten—including playtime, circle time, and arts and crafts—and then home time. Interspersed with labels for practical objects are more abstract terms like happy, kindness, and family, teaching children about emotions and mindfulness as well as educational vocabulary.

What is the My World in 100 series? My World in 100 Words series of board books helps children ages one to three boost their vocabulary, engage with the world around them, and become familiar with specific subjects.

With bright, playful illustrations from Sophie Beer, each book explores a different theme, including starting kindergarten, the garden, and the seaside. The books contain ten words per page and variation between full scenes and visual lists, there’s plenty for children to look at and enjoy.

My Thoughts

The months before your child heads off to kindergarten can be an exciting yet scary time. There are new words to learn, new rules and new people. It can be both a happy and frightening time for your child, especially if they are not used to being outside the home. It can also be really tough on a parent to teach and talk to them about this time in their life – where do we start? What do we focus on?

This beautifully illustrated book introduces them to key words and objects that they will experience in kindergarten. From learning about the walk to school, to lunch time to going home and everything in between, this book allows you to get the conversation started on school, your own experiences and perhaps even a sibling’s experience.

I love how key emotions and action words are added to each page throughout the book. On the page of going to kindergarten, we see friends but we are also introduced to emotions and feelings like laughing and happiness. As a parent, you can describe your own feelings of going to school for the first time and meeting new and old friends and how happy this made you. You may also want to talk about being nervous and how you got over those feelings.

This is a beautiful book geared to young children that will allow you to have those great talks about going to school for the first time but in a way that they can understand and relate to. They can learn about what they will experience in kindergarten and ask questions about play time and lunch time. They can also talk about the many emotions and feelings that they may be going through. A definite must have for young children as they start off on their journey in school.

You can purchase a copy of this book on Amazon and Indigo.

About QED

Working with acclaimed authors and consultants, QED Publishing’s mission is simple – to create fresh, informative, high-quality books that will appeal to children, parents and teachers alike.

Ever since QED’s inception in 2003, each book has been specifically designed to make learning exciting, stimulating and fun for children. QED’s diverse range of titles covers everything from entertaining, innovative facts for the classroom to beautifully illustrated fiction that kids will want to take home. Get inspired and get learning – the fun starts here!

Disclosure: I received a copy of this book in order to facilitate this review. All opinions expressed are my own.

June 21, 2019

The Big Book of Knowledge

A whole world of discovery awaits in the Big Book of Knowledge, and it will keep curious kids endlessly captivated.

About Big Book of Knowledge

The perfect encyclopedia for any information-hungry kid who would like to boost their general knowledge, this pocket-sized book is packed full of facts.

From earthquakes to Marco Polo, magnets to how the brain works, this fully updated six hundred page book covers just about every topic that a curious child will want to learn about.

The perfect resource for school-aged children, this book will be a reference point for years’ worth of homework, research, and school projects.

Updated photography and illustration are combined to show what others only tell you. Annotation points out the details that you might miss at first and gives you a detailed overview of every subject that you can think of.

Our Thoughts

This small but mighty book is jam packed with everything and anything you would ever need to know (or didn’t even realize you wanted to know).

The book covers four chapters: earth and space, the natural world, our world and science and technology. Each chapter is further broken down into additional sections such as, plant life, people in the past, food and farming and so on.

You can start off reading this book how ever you want – you do not have to read it from the front cover to the back and I encourage you not to. Instead open up that table of contents and choose a chapter and section that appeals the most to you. We started with the natural world as our kids love animals. Of course the very first page we stumble upon – Plankton! It was not the Plankton that our youngest had imagined (thank you Spongebob) but he really did enjoy learning about this creature before moving on to the mammals section.

Each topic has two dedicated pages to it (i.e. apes will span both pages) and each page is just slightly larger than a 4×6 photo and easily fits into the palm of your hands. The book contains beautiful images but the words take prominence in this book which I loved but also makes it suited to an older child or young adult.

This is a fantastic book to get your child (and you) learning in the summer months. Read as much or as little as you want each time, bring it to the beach, enjoy it at a soccer game – the possibilities and learning are endless. You will truly treasure this special small book that is jam packed with knowledge.

You can purchase a copy of this book on Amazon and Indigo.

Disclosure: I received a copy of this book in order to facilitate this review. All opinions expressed are my own.

April 23, 2019

Calm Mindfulness for Kids Book Review

Calm: Mindfulness for Kids shows that supporting a child’s positive mental health doesn’t need to be expensive, time-consuming, or difficult. Activities help children to de-stress, focus, and get moving while having fun.

About Calm Mindfulness for Kids

Teach your kids how to focus their thoughts and notice the world around them with this fun mindfulness kids activity book.

Mindfulness activities are a great way to teach children about their thoughts and feelings and how to understand them–while having fun at the same time.

This book is packed with activities–make a mindfulness jar, learn how to appreciate food with mindful eating, and get out into nature and explore the outside world. An illustrated journal section at the back of the book encourages children to make notes about their own thoughts and feelings.

Calm: Mindfulness for Kids has everything you need to know about focusing your child’s mind to help them enjoy and appreciate things that they take for granted every day, while boosting their confidence and self-esteem. Children are guided through each activity, to make sure they achieve maximum enjoyment and awareness. All children will learn and react to each activity in a different way and parent’s notes give advice on how to encourage children to embrace mindfulness in the modern world. Each specially designed activity is flexible for each child’s needs and inspires them to seek calmness and tranquility in all situations.

Our Thoughts

Mindfulness is something we hear a lot about in the news, media and research. It is an important to tool in the busy times we live in. It helps us to focus, pay attention and remain present in the moment.

Sometimes, children can be overlooked and brushed off as being too emotional or acting out. Children feel a lot of emotions but many don’t have the tools to help them understand their feelings and how to process them. We need to teach our kids these skills in order to be successful later in life.

What I really liked is this book is geared towards children. She writes to the child first – you as a parent can read a long and help but the child is the most important part in this book. She speaks to the child in a mature, open and caring manner that encourages your child to open up, read more and try each activity presented.

She presents six chapters and encourages your child to move through them in any order they need – the choice is up to them. The chapters include: focus, calm, move, change, care and reflect. Each chapter has activities, crafts and exercises that they can do alone or with a parent or a friend. Each section has helpful tools to encourage your child to reflect on the activity, exercise or craft – this helps to reinforce the learning process. We started with rainbow breath and unwind stress – these were also amazing for Mom too! Our next craft to try is energy slime!

This is an extremely thoughtful book for children of all ages to help them get in touch with their emotions, feelings and body and encourage a positive outlet for them.

You can purchase a copy of this book on Amazon and Indigo.

Disclosure: I received a copy of this book in order to facilitate this review. All opinions expressed are my own.