Fun, original, possibly a saviour of our sanity in the summer holidays? A great way of getting kids active? You bet we're up for this one...!

Here's a neat and rather intriguing idea to enhance your days out with the aid of an innovative and fun activity pack...

We're doing a bit of a rain dance on the blog at the moment, hoping that 2016 will be the year of the activity book. We had a LOT of fun with activity and art books in 2015 and here's a fantastic one to kick off the new year in style.

Herve Tullet is the genius creator of hundreds of fantastic children's books and he's now come up with a genius way for kids to draw and design their own stories, even if they're not super-confident in their art skills.

"My Stencil Kit" comes with 6 huge die-cut boards containing 200 stencils, covering a wide range of subjects from alphabet characters to animals, from curls to geometric shapes and tons of other fantastic designs in between.

The stencil sheets come with a nice large format book (which would have been even better if it had been spiral bound but you can't have everything) full of interesting and intriguing 'scenery' to get your designs off to a roaring start.

We couldn't resist diving right in with our pencils and pens to put those interesting and intriguing stencil designs to good use. More artistic kids (and adults) will love adapting the designs to produce more fully fleshed-out works of art but even if you just love making patterns and nonsense drawings (who DOESN'T love drawing giraffes body-surfing on the roofs of cars) then you're going to find tons and tons to do in this interesting new art book.

Charlotte's favourite bit: Some cool background designs to really get your artwork off to a flying start.

Daddy's favourite bit: A great new activity book that enables kids of all abilities to design brilliant artwork and scenes to tell their own stories with. Absolutely absorbing and beautifully designed by a true genius of children's art.

(Kindly sent to us for review by Thames and Hudson)

"My Stencil Kit" 

Written and Illustrated by Herve Tullet

Published by Thames and Hudson

Publication Date: 29th February 2016

 At any given moment during the day when there's a moment or two of free time, Charlotte and I are avid doodlers. The house is rapidly filling up with sketch books full of scribbles and doodles, and we've seen some brilliant activity books over the years that let you collect together your random artistic musings in new and neat ways.

Susan McBride's "Doodle Notebooks" are perfect for a bit of surreptitious scribbling. At first glance they look very like proper notebooks, which means they're perfect for me to sneak into meetings with and do some drawing while folk yammer on about yawn-some computery stuff.

The "I'm So Bored" doodle notebook and the equally fabulous "Don't Get Caught" doodle notebook give you stacks of inspiration and ideas to take your doodling to the next stage. With tons of imaginative scribbles to get you started, and quite a cheeky and subversive sense of humour throughout, you'll soon
be finding lots of excuses to whip out your doodle notebook and unleash your creativity.

We thoroughly tested both, and possibly the only minus points to mention are that these could seriously rock if they were spiral-bound (stretching them out for scribbling was a mite tough). They could probably also do with a bit more space for your scribblings, as some pages are a bit of a tight squeeze if you're the sort of person who likes loads of blank canvas to work on.

"I'm So Bored - The Doodle Notebook" and "Don't Get Caught - The Doodle Notebook", both written and illustrated by Susan McBride are out again on 7th October 2015 from Lark.

There's something deliciously infectious, delightful and addictive about Alain Gree's work. Here's a glorious activity book that will keep your little ones out of trouble at half term!

Hit the catwalks in fine style, a fabulous fashion design book with tons of amazing styles to trace and copy..."Fashion Rebel Outfit Maker" is our first book of the week this week!

In an age when kids are increasingly looking to digital forms of entertainment to pass their time, can books compete using new and innovative tricks to win new readers over? We think so - step this way for a great journey inside one such book!

Forget Wally, have fun finding the illustrious Bard hidden amongst scenes from his most popular plays. An awesome historical and fun book, here's "Where's Will?"

A gigantic colourful journey around the bustling cities of our world, with sticker and navigation fun. Don't forget your passport!

The sun is out, the sky is blue, there's not a cloud to spoil the view so what better time to break our "Christmas Reviews 2015" duck with a fabulous paper-making activity book from a legend in crafting!

Wide Eyed Editions fantastic "Atlas of Adventures" by Lucy Letherland was very well received by us on the blog, and you can read our review all about this fantastic book here...

This rather smashing pair of books, packed full of sticker fun and colouring pages have that magic effect on Charlotte of keeping her completely absorbed for hours on end. At the moment she's absolutely bonkers about anything to do with drawing, colouring and stickering so Jessica Secheret's books "Kokeshi Dolls" and "Dolls of the World" are excellent value.

Kokeshi Dolls

These collectable Japanese dolls come in all shapes and sizes, and this book celebrates the collectable phenomenon with brilliant colouring pages, letting your child's imagination and fashion design skills loose.

The stickers can be used in each scene to compliment the outfits and your child's colouring skills, and there are more than enough to use in their own drawings once they've finished with the book.






Dolls of the World

During the summer, we were driven practically out of our minds by "It's a Small World" at Disneyland Paris. Every time Charlotte heard that 'Tick, Tock, Tick, Tock' we had to go on the ride and sit through that earworm tune. In fact just typing about it, I can hear that happy little ditty.

"Dolls of the World" instantly reminded Charlotte of the "It's a Small World" ride and she loved all the various national costumes, and the scenes from countries around the world.

I've a small niggle about this book, just a minor one, the scenes and characters were often so big that it was rather difficult to find room for the stickers included with the book. Each set of stickers had a specific page they 'belonged' to, but Charlotte (being a little perfectionist) didn't want to stick the stickers over any other elements of the page. Just a small drawback but again the stickers can be used in children's own drawings so it's still a nice book.

A great duo of activity books that are excellent quality and educational too.

Charlotte's best bit: She really loved the Norwegian girl ("She is me!") and Mio, the pink Kokeshi Doll.

Daddy's favourite bit: The sheer silence accompanying Charlotte's complete and utter absorption in these two books, broken only by her asking questions about the various costumes and countries in the Dolls of the World book.

Charlotte gets busy colouring in costumes from Egypt.

(Books kindly supplied to us for review by Blue Apple Books / Mat Archer)