My kids love colouring, sticking in stickers, following mazes and filling in quizzes. Are there any good books around that we could take on holiday? Nothing too like school work – if possible!
Colouring in is all the rage – and not just for children! The current runaway success of colouring books for stressed adults shows just how valuable everyone finds a bit of thoughtful colouring. It’s such a good way of relaxing and unwinding.
As everyone is finding, colouring in well requires concentration and commitment but it can also be soothing. For younger children colouring in books can be particularly popular when they are based on stories they already know, such as in the very attractive colouring in version of Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury’s classic picture book We Going on a Bear Hunt.
Whether copying the original colours or using your own palette, “creating” the characters yourself brings the story alive in a new way. In Johanna Basford’s Secret Garden: An Inky Treasure Hunt and Colouring Book the colouring is more complex and sophisticated – and there is also an on-going treasure hunt which it is fun to follow. The journey of discovery begins with that well-loved introduction to a story – a long fall down a rabbit hole. The world at the bottom of the rabbit hole is a secret garden full of hidden creatures and surprises which will only come to light when the black-and-white illustrations are coloured in. Revealing the hidden surprises makes colouring in here especially rewarding.
Making contributions to Katie Scott’s Animalium Activity Book is an even more sophisticated activity. A wonderful new addition to the award-winning original Animalium by Jenny Broom and Katie Scott, a beautifully created introduction to over 200 animals of all kinds. In this version the original illustrations and some of the facts serve as a stimulus to all kinds of activities such as “Draw your own exotic bird”, “Add some more snakes to the tangles” or “Draw your own food chain”. This is a book to treasure and creating additional material in it will make it extra-special.
Using the same principles and in the same series, Aleksandra Mizielinska and Daniel Mizielinski’s Maps Activity Book is a little more difficult but equally rewarding. There is a wide range of information about all kinds of aspects of the world, as well as puzzles to be solved and new things to be drawn and designed.
Getting into another subject area, Terry Deary’s and Martin Brown’s best-selling Horrible Histories cover topics that are on the school curriculum but they will not make you feel that you are being dragged back to school. Especially in the sticker book version such as Terrifying Tudors – Horrible Histories Sticker Activity Book. The book has over 250 stickers to help readers understand the unpredictable Tudor monarchs and to help them make some of their madder decisions!
If you want to have a more sociable activity, quizzes can be good family fun. Despite the rather competitive sounding titles of Chris Dickason’s Quiz Book for Clever Kids and its companion volume Brain Games for Clever Kids by Gareth Moor – both titles are more about fun than proving how brainy you are. Highly illustrated, they include loads of jokes and lots of kinds of questions, including multiple choice, which suitable for different ages and interests. Even before you arrive on holiday quiz books can be a great help when a car journey feels as if it is going on forever!
Have great colouring and activity books to share? Email childrens.books@theguardian.com or get in touch on Twitter @GdnchildrensBks( where you can also ask The Book Doctor a question using #BookDoctor) and we’ll add them to this blog!
