AUTHOR

Vicki Manning has a love of crafting and creating original ideas for children friendly craft projects. She currently lives in Oxfordshire with her family. Vicki posts regular activities on her Instagram account @howweplayandlearn, where she posts daily crafting activities for kids and adults to do together.

WHO IS THE TARGET AUDIENCE?

This book is for parents, care givers, teachers, extended family members or anyone who wishes to entertain, educate or just have fun with crafts and kids.

SYNOPSIS

The Grown-Up’s Guide to Crafting with Kids is the debut work of Vicki Manning. The initial impression from the book cover is this is an exciting craft guide. The colorful exterior with bright hues and interesting projects grabs the viewer immediately and provides for a pleasant experience. I couldn’t wait to open the book and view the 25 craft ideas.

Manning’s craft guide is intended for young children and their caregivers or educators and it shows. The images are colorful and interesting. It isn’t hard to image a child excitedly anticipating creating one of the many crafting ideas.

The book begins with a brief introduction followed by a getting started section. There is a dual page spread that explains the necessary items required for creating the enclosed craft ideas. All of the required items are kid friendly and safe to use with proper supervision.

Manning provides us with a wide range of original and unique suggestions for art creation, such as:

Nature

Around the home

Clay robots

Pom-pom ice-cream cones

Sun printing

Treasure boxes

Wax-resist bookmarks

And much more

The pages are laid out in window style accompanied by brief extracts describing methods and helpful advice. Manning has been careful to suggest ideas that use easily accessible tools and materials. My favorite craft was the paper mache rocket. Although I have to admit, I love the home made bookmarks. The bookmarks are quick, cute, practical, and even young children can make them.

CONCLUSION

Vicki Manning has created 25 fun ideas for you and your child to make crafting memories together. With many families currently staying at home, this book will provide some useful ideas to entertain and bond with your children. The memories created by this joint effort will last a lifetime.

⭐⭐⭐
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Vicki Manning, NetGalley, and Walter Foster Publishing for affording me the opportunity to review The Grown-Up’s Guide to Crafting with Kids: 25+ Fun and Easy Craft Projects to Inspire You and the Little Ones in Your Life.

The Grown Ups Guide to painting with kids is easy to follow with clear instructions on how to do pour painting that is suitable for even little hands

This book will be a big hit with lots of readers, just not for me. As a craft-loving mom of 5, I love painting with kids and was really excited to preview this book. I should have looked more closely at the subtitle, as it's not so much about painting with kids as doing paint pouring. I know paint pouring is fun and makes great looking results, but this sort is also rather expensive, environmentally destructive, mildly toxic and more suited for older kids or grown ups. The author claims to recommend affordable materials, but these are not the kind of projects you can put together with things from home and a few dollars. Paint pouring uses a lot of paint and often other mediums added, and then she does things like have you set it all up on plastic cups and use lots of disposable items, purchased materials like tiles, added chemicals, etc. She recommends glitter and many other environmentally unfriendly materials without discussing environmentally friendly options, which is fine for some but was disappointing to me. The projects produce lovely items, but they are rather elaborate and will be difficult for most kids to replicate without lots of help from the adult.

I'm just not that kind of art loving mom. I'm the kind to make homemade paint in reusable bottles with flour, water and food coloring and have the kids squirt it all into papers in a box to make a big old (safe, contained) mess for pennies.

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(Instructions and recipe are here: Squirt Painting)

Or to make microwave puffy paint with self rising flour, water and food coloring, and paint it onto recycled boxes.

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(Instructions here: Easy Puffy Paint)

As I said, this book will be a great hit for some. I'm just not the target audience. Two stars for "it was okay."

I read a temporary digital ARC of this book for the purpose of review.