Category: childrens books

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 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.

June 21, 2019

DKfindout! Space Travel

This children’s book on space travel is packed with inspiring stories and facts about space exploration, astronauts, and the first moon landing.

About DKfindout! Space Travel

DK findout! Space Travel is ideal for children who love to learn about adventures in space. From the first astronaut in space to the Apollo Moon landings, this book is full of exciting facts about the astronauts who explored space, including Yuri Gagarin’s first journey into space and Neil Armstrong’s moon landing.

Learn about the sun, our solar system, the International Space Station, how to be an astronaut, the Space Race, and new worlds discovered by space-exploring probes.

This children’s book is packed with amazing facts that will delight young readers. It is written by experts and checked by an educational consultant. Part of the award-winning DKfindout! series, this exciting book includes amazing photography and illustrations that help children understand the wonders of space travel.

Our Thoughts

Do you have a little Astronaut in the house? Someone who loves space, rockets and space travel?

Then this book is for that special child in your life. This soft cover book explores the world of space travel and is packed full of interesting facts, incredible photos and more. The coolest fact we learned? In 2001, Dennis Tito became the first space flight participant – he paid more than $20 million to spend a week on the ISS! I had no idea that a regular person had already gone up in space nor that it could cost that much money (I guess my plans are now out the window!). This book also features fun games – want to play a game of space quest? Check out page 44 for some fun to break up the reading.

This is a fun book for children of all ages who want to be an astronaut, love space travel or maybe love Star Trek or Star Wars. It gets them thinking about the world around us, what it would be like to travel in space, is there life outside of our planet and what does space travel have the potential to look like in thirty, fifty and even sixty years from now. They will enjoy and appreciate the bright, bold photos and the amazing amount of cool facts found within its pages. A definite must read for children this summer – maybe even get them started on building their own space rocket in the backyard?

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.

June 11, 2019

Knowledge Genius

Open the pages of Knowledge Genius to find out what you know, and challenge yourself to learn even more!

About Knowledge Genius

A fun general knowledge quiz book for kids – test their brain and see who will be crowned a genius!

Children won’t be able to resist the Knowledge Genius brain-busting challenge. For every topic, pages are packed with eye-popping pictures – but do you know what they show? To help you, “Test Yourself” panels list what you’re looking for. With three levels of difficulty, the challenge gets harder as you work your way from Starter, to Challenger, and finally the truly tricky Genius category. If you need it, there’s a fun fact with every picture to give a helpful clue.

With more than 60 topics, from across the encyclopedia, there’s something for everyone. Can you name the most famous rivers worldwide? Do you know your cranium from your clavicle, or do you need to bone up on the parts of the human skeleton? Are you a demon on dinosaurs, and able to spot the difference between an archaeopteryx and an allosaurus? Perhaps you’re a brain box and can do all of this standing on your head? You can!

Our Thoughts

This amazing hard cover book was so much fun learning both together and on my own (I say on my own because I wanted to cheat a bit and study before we quizzed each other the second time!).

In order to use this book, you start off each chapter with learning about the basics of that chapters (chapters include: space, nature, geography, history and culture). Then comes the harder parts, you need to challenge yourself by looking at the test yourself section and then the quizzes. Each page has helpful pictures and clues to help guide you to your answer, along with increasingly difficult questions. You can find the answers at the bottom of each page upside down. Each chapter starts with its own picture quiz, which I didn’t realize at first!

This is an excellent learning tool and activity to play together as a family and especially for those little ones who may not be always so keen on reading by themselves. They will truly enjoy the challenge of answering the questions, reading the clues and looking at the pictures. You definitely don’t have to do the whole chapter at a time – you don’t even have to go in order. The learning should be fun – I started with History which I love (and knew I could beat those kids with!!) but they loved the nature section. This will become a true family favourite in all homes.

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.