So the children are home on Easter break. If you feel like a change from craft activities or you want the children to do self-supervised creative play for a while, then a doodle book is a good idea. Personally, I’ve never bought doodle books for my children because the ones I’ve seen seemed geared towards school-aged children. At home, we usually use plain white paper or a colouring book with large images. I was pleased to receive the Doodle, Spots, Stripes and Squiggles from Parragon Book which is aimed at 3+ years.
Both my children enjoy drawing and painting. However, I tend to guide and supervise the painting activity for mess control purposes. Drawing, colouring and ‘doodling’ the kids can do on their own with crayons or colour pencils. When we received the Doodle, Spots, Stripes and Squiggles book, I went through a few pages with Angelo to give him an idea of how the book was meant to be use. I then left him to colour and make patterns. Honestly, perhaps my approach was not best. While he initially liked the idea of having a new book to colour in, I think he was put off by the implied requirement to follow a certain structure. Despite his response, I still believe its a good book for the following reasons:
- Its made of steady material
- Its unisex
- The illustrations are large enough for little hands to colour-in or follow to create a pattern
- Its a portable and will fit easily into a kids knapsack or baby changing bag
- It will help little ones to focus and improve observation skills.
Doodle, Spot, Stripes and Squiggles invites little ones to ‘Finish the patterns, squiggles and shapes to create amazingly imaginative doodles. Inventive prompts and artistic page starters will inspire your child to doodle, create, enjoy. Simple concepts throughout introduce learning in a fun, friendly way.’ While it can be used as a first step to writing, from my experience I’d suggest leave it as a relaxed play activity. Allow little ones to enjoy having their own doodle book to do as they like. It RRP £8.00
Book Details:
Paperback
Publisher: Parragon Book Service Ltd (28 Nov. 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1472364953
ISBN-13: 978-1472364951
Product Dimensions: 26.8 x 21.4 x 1.4 cm
Please note: This is not a sponsored post, although I received this product from the publisher for free to trial for the purpose of this review. They do not exercise any editorial control over my review for anything else on this site.