This was the second Rick Riordon book signing we have attended at BookPeople. Papalibrarian took this picture of H and I waiting in line to get our 39 Clues: Maze of Bones books signed. I love the look on H’s face-a little bit of author awe! Exactly what I would expect from the son of two librarians.
For all those kids who run off with the empty toilet paper rolls, the new book Make It, by Jane Bull is for you. Make It is filled with crafts to make with recyclables. It is divided into sections for Paper Crafts, Metal Crafts, Plastic Crafts, and Fabric Crafts. The book is filled with brightly colored photographs of the projects. The photographs inspire you to come up with ideas of your own. The tools and supplies needed to make the crafts are simple and most likely already on hand. All you really need are glue, scissors, tape, and whatever is in the recycle bin. My daughter, C, is currently stockpiling plastic bottles in her room to make into a birdfeeder.
Another book that is great for kids who like to build things is Amazing Leonardo Da Vinci Inventions You Can Build Yourself, by Maxine Anderson. Geared toward an older age group, the projects in this book require adult supervision. Each project is prefaced by a section that describes the historical and scientific basis for the project, and the relationship to Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches and techniques.
My son, H, has an entire plastic bin filled with paper airplanes he has folded. He likes to get them out and throw them, so that they cover his room. They are all different sizes. For inspiration he gets out his Super Simple Paper Airplanes, by Nick Robinson. The illustrations for folding in this book are very detailed, but still some require adult help. The planes range in complexity, so there are planes that you can fold right away and others that require more time.
And in the crafty department, I recently added Making Stuff for Kids, by Victoria Woodcock to our bookshelves. It has crafts for kids as young as three. It also has instructions for teaching kids basic sewing, knitting, cross stitch, appliqué, felting, paper mache, and pompom making. Each chapter is grouped by age. There is also an “Adult” section at the end of the book with such craft projects as a child’s tea dress, apron, and birdhouse. The magnetic button spider caught the eye of the kids right away.
In school, especially elementary school, math never seemed like much of a big deal. It was just one of those things you had to work through. Worksheets with pictures of money on them, fractions, and lots of counting pictures were the standard. I am not sure things have changed that much. It is hard to get my son, H, excited about math. Recently, C has been complaining that she doesn’t know “hard math” like her older brother, so I started looking around for some of our good math resources to get us started.
One of our favorite books to get in the mood for math is A Million Dots by Andrew Clements. Filled with facts such as, “It would take 464,000 school-lunch cartons of chocolate milk to fill a 20 by 40 foot swimming pool.” Or “The sun has a diameter of 864,948 miles-wide enough to fit 109 earths.” The book also contains one million dots. The dots are tiny and overlay each picture. At the bottom of each page is a tally of the number of dots represented up to that page.
We have two fantastic math games, Magic Cauldron and Potty Professor. I purchased these from the UK company, Orchard Toys. I believe Magic Cauldron is available from domestic sources. Magic Cauldron is an addition and subtraction game, and Potty Professor is its multiplication and division counterpart. Both have these awesome heat sensitive cards that you rub to reveal the answer. Sometimes we do not play the game, but just solve the problems and rub off the answers on the back. There is just something so appealing about rubbing off the answer, then having it “disappear” again. The kids can’t resist this math game.
I found these flip math books by Anna Neilson called I Can Add and I Can Subtract. C prefers some quiet time and self-directed learning, so these are a good choice for her. C likes these because she can study them on her own. Each flip card has a picture representation of the problem and it flips over for the answer in both picture and numeric form.