Activity Books, Grief, And More!

This collection of 60 activities ranges in ease and complexity and can be easily adapted to multiple ages and with various materials. The first one my daughter and I tried was a rainbow village building activity inspired by Rainbow Grandpa Huang Yung-Fu, a soldier who painted every building in his Taiwanese village various colors and patterns when he learned it would be destroyed. The village survives and can now be visited. I love that Wong-Nizic includes that information with the activity. This craft required boxes of various sizes, brown craft paper, tape, and a variety of coloring utensils. We wrapped the boxes in the brown paper and drew and painted colorful patterns onto them, creating a little mini village. We looked at images from the real village as we drew! Other activities include making rock dominoes, a very important person statue, and more. Often the activities are inspired by real people and artists.

I just received this one in the mail and haven’t had a chance to try out any of the activities yet, but I’m excited! This activity book includes seven “fun” sections: In the Fresh Air, With Paper, With Science, You Can Eat, With Crafts, With Imagin-yay-tion, and With Family. Most of these are very simple, classic activities like making snowflakes, ice cream in a bag, spiral friendship bracelets, a shoe shop, and more.

I was so excited when I heard about this one! This book’s goal is to “engage in art activities that work toward removing biases, promoting change, and taking action.” It’s divided into six units: Identity, Culture, Community, Empathy, Justice, and Activism. Activities include transforming your name into a work of art, celebrating community heroes and helpers through making papers and portraits, creating miniature billboards that address a social issue, and more. These activities can be adapted for all ages.

We have a variety of science activity books but this is the one we use the most, primarily because it has many experiments with household items we actually have! We’ve squeezed an egg into a bottle, made electric oobleck, conducted some potato science, and more. I do recommend checking out the required materials list before tackling some of these, though! While many are pretty easy, several have less common materials.