Recipes for Play: Creative Activities for Small Hands and Big Imaginations - Softcover

Mitchener, Ruth; Sumner, Rachel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1615192182 ISBN 13: 9781615192182

Publisher: The Experiment, 2014

Synopsis

More than 35 activities and ideas that inspire children to explore the world around them.

An important part of childhood is being curious and trying out new experiences. What do things taste, feel, smell, sound like? What happens when you add red to blue, mix earth with water, or drop a blob of paint from a great height? These childhood experiments are vital for development and provide hours of entertainment.

Recipes for Play contains easy and inexpensive ideas for engaging your child’s senses. Many wonderful hours can be spent playing with natural ingredients found in your kitchen cupboard or backyard garden. Make your own face paint in minutes, whip up a batch of oozy slime, create clouds of color with rainbow rice, and so much more.

Sisters Rachel Sumner and Ruth Mitchener have created Recipes for Play for parents and teachers―or anyone with a child in their life―who want to encourage tactile learning but don’t want their lives to be controlled by chaos. Each recipe has easy-to-follow instructions for setting up activities and simple steps for cleaning up once the fun is finished.

62 color photographs

About this title

About the Author

Rachel Sumner is a book reviewer for The Australian Women’s Weekly. She previously worked as a children’s book sales rep for Beattie And Forbes Booksellers in Hawkes Bay, New Zealand. Her writing has also appeared in the Marlborough Express. She lives in Auckland with her two wonderful girls and a ginger cat called Ginger.

Ruth Mitchener is a multi-award winning designer for Crown Equipment. She also works independently, specializing in book design, graphic design, illustration, photography, and product design. She lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Reviews

This book opens with the question "Dear Mess, Why are we not better friends?" and continues with a promise to try to embrace a more chaotic home where children are full of wonder and excited by play. Aimed at parents of preschoolers, the work strongly emphasizes sensory play, laying out 40 different activities, including recipes for slime and pavement paint, ideas for creating a miniature boat race, and instructions on building a fairy house. Although a few activities are obvious, like taking all the cushions off the couch or playing with buckets of water, most are thoughtful and clever, such as freezing small objects in water and letting children become archaeologists to excavate the treasure. The activities are organized by where they would take place: indoors, outdoors, or on the go. Each project is clearly described with information on set-up and clean-up time, mess factor (low to high), needed supplies, and a sensory guide, which discusses the senses each activity will engage. The bright, full-color photographs bring this title to life. All activities are designed with a focus on natural materials, and the authors even include information on creating natural dyes so that kids can finally create truly edible play dough.—Rachael Myers-Ricker, Horace Mann School, Bronx, NY

Edition details

• Publisher: The Experiment
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1615192182
• ISBN 13: 9781615192182
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128