Making Things: The Handbook of Creative Discovery

A comprehensive craft book for young readers comes complete with stories, personal messages of inspiration from various authors and artists, and instructions for 125 different projects, including puppets, weaving, tie-dying, printing, batiks, and more.

Grade 4-8. A compilation of the "best selections" from Making Things and Making Things 2, published in the 1970s, this book has many inspirational quotes, philosophical tidbits, and a wealth of creative ideas. "Save Things for Making Things" is a valuable list that opens the presentation. Not only are there things to save, but also reasons for doing so. Several excellent articles, "Connecting Things with Ideas," "Questions," and "Solutions," are appended. The body of the book has many activities to stimulate creativity and will be a valuable resource for adults, but is not a source children should be given for independent use. The projects are mainly for beginners, often children, but the author minimizes precautions and requests for adult help. Pages are very busy with directions that jump from the gutter edge to the margin, numerous diagrams, and personal asides. Those who are looking for some craft ideas and have time to read everything carefully first, and make a sample so that they are familiar with steps that need guidance, may want to consider this book. Nancy Blakey's Lotions, Potions, and Slime (Tricycle, 1996) will better serve adults who have any apprehensions about their own craft abilities or about crafting with children as active participants.?Marilyn Fairbanks, East Junior High School, Brockton, MA
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

...Ann Sayre Wiseman has made a book that is untied to any single task. A teacher of teachers, she has developed the material over 25 years of working among schoolchildren and adults of many ages. For more than 100 activities, the drawings and clear, hand-lettered text take a reader into her cheerful presence. A list will suggest what is here: papermaking in variety; papery products such as simple masks, beads and mobiles; printing from fingertips, from whole scaly fish, from carved potatoes and many variants. The most athletic demand is a nifty page on stilts and stilt walking. The most mathematical is weaving, even at its simplest. The most technological is how to buy electrical conduit or copper tubing, to cut with hacksaw or pipe cutter for music from your new metallophone. Most delicious is the bread sculpture. The author has extended it to produce bread mermaids, crocodiles, and a lion peaceably enfolding a lamb...