I was given a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
My Review: Let me just start off by saying that I have kids. Lots of them. Maybe you have more than I do, but I have four, and I consider that just shy of a small army. Anyway, I am prefacing this whole review with that because I am no kid novice. I know something of children and what they like. I actually do have one kid who is especially talented at art (and yes, I’m completely biased), but the others enjoy it a lot, just like many kids do. So I feel like I’ve been exposed to art and artsy things for kids quite a bit.
So I was ridiculously excited to get this book and guess
what? It exceeded my expectations!
First off, it’s beautiful. The cover is really pretty,
the colors are bright and fun, and the pictures in the actual book are a
vibrant, happy mixture of real photos and drawn. It’s really quite clever and
fun. Secondly, this book tackles a lot of information and it does it in a way
that I think is both accessible to kids, but is not too basic. For instance, I think
it’s too much for my almost-three-year-old, but in a couple of years, I know
he’ll love it. My seven-year-old takes art lessons and yet I feel like it had
something to teach him even though he’s had quite a bit of exposure to art and
color. I read through it first myself, in fact, and although I am no artist, I
have been around on this planet for quite a few years and I felt like I still
learned some cool things about color while reading it. Foster does a really good
job of taking what could possibly be really complex ideas about color and what
they can do and how they react with one another and simplifying them to the
point that a child can see and understand.
I really liked that this book would teach a concept, show
the concept, and then give the kids a chance to try by providing them with
places to color or fill in. My only complaint about this book comes here—I wish
there was more for them to do at the end of each lesson. I don’t know about
your kids, but mine always want to just colorcolorcolor and so when they learn
something really cool about color (like they certainly did in this book) they
want to colorcolorcolor but there isn’t a lot of places to do that in here. It is definitely a book that a parent and a child
would work on together because it’s more of a teaching than a
doing book. That being said, of course they can apply it to other spaces to
color outside of this book so it’s not like they’re suffering. Also, this book
is pretty substantial so I think it’s a good size and doesn’t really have room
for that. My kids were just so inspired! And that, of course, is the point. And
a very good thing.
If you are one of those parents who buys activity books
for your children (and I’m thinking of the kind that they do over the summer to
prepare them for the next grade or for younger children working on learning the
alphabet and shapes, etc.), then this is definitely a book I think you would
really appreciate. It’s beautiful, it’s educational, and I think it’s really a
lot of fun. It seems to be unique in that I haven’t seen another book for
teaching kids specifically about color.
My Rating: 5 stars
For the sensitive
reader: This is a beautiful, simple, children’s book. It is clean.
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