Choosing the right activity book
We all are suckers for activity books and I am sure we all have a few hiding in cabinets or the car. They seem like a great, colourful and ‘easy’ way to entertain or support our children’s learning. However, a lot of the time they can actually hinder a lot of our children’s creativity, imagination and innate desire to learn. Here’s an example:
Your child has a plain piece of paper in front of them, you might see a plain piece of paper, but they’re envisioning magnificent worlds or wild animals to draw. If they’re not, then this simple piece of paper is challenging your child’s brain to access that problem solving creative space of their brain. In comparison, you have an activity book with pages of animals to colour in or to copy and our adult brain automatically thinks it’s great inspiration, however we are boxing our children in to only focus on this one specific subject, limiting creativity and imagination.
However, there are some activity books that I love and I do believe there is a space for certain activity boks in our everyday lives. A few examples of some ones that I personally love (and am not affiliated with) are:
This Eric Carle sticker book is a great activity book to have as the pages are much more of an inspiration for drawing than a prescription, as well as having beautifully illustrated stickers.
This sticker pad is all about creating different animal faces using stickers, it is great for fine motor skills, spatial awareness and mapping and quite open ended for an activity book.
One of our favourite activity books is this British Animal sticker book where you explore the different scenarios and can add in your stickers to add to it. It is beautiful and we spend a lot of time looking through the pages after we’ve used all the stickers up.
Things to note when looking at activity books:
If you are using activity books to enhance your toddlers writing, reading or mathematics make sure you are using lots of play based learning opportunities to strengthen these concepts as learning through activity books is a much more shallow dpeth of learning.
Try and find ones that are tools for inspiration in comparison to a prescribed manual, for example, open pages for unprompted drawing, stickers that can be used in many different ways.
It might feel silly to invest in a more expensive activity book but choosing high quality illustrations and stickers can make a huge difference to our children’s creativity.
It can be tempting to get all the colourful ones but taking a minute to actually look through the pages and envision how your toddler will explore it can be the difference between them piling up in your cabinet and actually being used.
Activity books should not be demonised but I do think it’s important for a few reasons to be more mindful of what their use is in our children’s learning and worlds. I’d love to know if you have some particular activity books that you love and find really useful.