Rainy Day Fun (Handy Crafts)

Provides directions for creating a variety of items, including kirigami flowers, picture frames, greeting cards, decorated boxes, and stenciled tee shirts.

Grade 3-6-Using readily available materials, children can make practical and entertaining items. Many of the projects, especially in Holiday Handiworks and Rainy Day Fun, can be found elsewhere, but their clear instructions and illustrations and the broad categorical grouping of ideas make these titles very handy for home and school use. Each craft is described on a spread with clearly numbered directions. Colorful watercolor-and-pencil illustrations accompany each step, and there is a color photo of each finished product. All of the books have a safety warning at the beginning, and individual potentially dangerous steps alert children to ask for adult help. A "helpful hint" gives ideas for modifying or using the item. Tracing patterns are included where necessary. Holiday Handiwork takes a multicultural as well as chronological approach, with New Year's noisemakers, a Chinese New Year dragon, a felt afikomen pouch for Passover, cotton-ball chicks in an egg-carton nest for Easter, a paper-tube turkey, a clay dreidel, a reindeer antler headband, and attractive paper beads for Kwanzaa. Using Rainy Day Fun, children can sew an apron and make veggie prints, simple musical instruments, greeting cards, a beaded dream catcher, and more. The projects in Terrific Toys take minutes to make but provide hours of playtime fun. There are directions for various spinning tops, felt fingertip puppets, a kaleidoscope, bead people, felt juggling blocks, a table-top version of soccer, and other toys that children enjoy using and giving as gifts. These are sound purchases where there is a need for clearly written, basic craft books.
Lynda Ritterman, Atco Elementary School, Waterford, NJ
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.