Book Review: The Grown-Up’s Guide to Crafting with Kids
Katie 
The Grown-Ups Guide to Crafting with Kids has a TON of fun projects to do with kids and some of them seem to be pretty easy to pull off! And really fun and cute results. Painting rocks to make them photo holders, painting leaves to make beautiful pastel rainbow wreaths, there are a ton of great ideas in here and a lot of ones I want to try and I don’t even have kids! (The space themed painted rocks are amazing, but I am not sure I am that talented!) Definitely a lot of ideas to try if you are stuck inside and you may even already have some of these supplies around the house.
I received a free e-copy of this book in order to write this review, I was not otherwise compensated.
About the Book
The ideal follow-up to the much-buzzed-about The Grown-Up’s Guide to Making Art with Kids, The Grown-Up’s Guide to Crafting with Kids features more tactile projects that will improve kids’ fine motor and visual processing skills, in addition to strengthening their focus and memory. Plus, crafting is super fun!
The book follows the same format as the first in the Grown-Up’s Guide series, consisting of multiple creative prompts, exercises, and step-by-step crafting projects that children and adults can do together. Author Vicki Manning, who runs a popular Instagram account where she regularly posts craft projects that she’s done with her own kids, The Grown-Up’s Guide to Crafting with Kids appeals to parents, caregivers, grandparents, teachers, and anyone else who wants to spend creative time with the kids in their lives. Kids will love working with adults to make crafts, which include:Clay robotsPom-pom ice-cream conesSun printingTreasure boxesWax-resist bookmarksAnd much moreChapters on tools and materials, sourcing materials around the home and outside, and suggestions for engagement and craft-making are included as well.
With fun, colorful, and appealing artwork and projects; easy-to-follow instructions; and crafts made from accessible, affordable, and popular materials, The Grown-Up’s Guide to Crafting with Kids will quickly become an essential book for families, preschool and elementary schools, art classes, and more.
Origami Collection is from 2012 and contains a collection of beautiful images of origami. The first half of the book shows all of the finished products and the second half contains prints that can be used as the paper to make your own and then the instructions on how to make the origami. I didn’t try to make any, but very much so enjoyed admiring all the photos.
The Code for Love and Heartbreak is supposed to be loosely based/retelling of Jane Austen’s Emma. I hadn’t ever read Emma before, so I’m not so sure about that. (I will look it up a synopsis and let you know similarities at the end of this review.) The book follows Emma who is a math genius that loves to code and is co-president of the coding club at school. I saw a lot of myself in Emma – would much rather stay home and code than be social, doesn’t want a boyfriend, etc. Except we never had a coding club when I was in high school and the guys in the one coding class that was offered at school couldn’t manage to figure out “Ctrl Alt Delete” (seriously!) One part of the book really hit home “Sometimes I dream in code. When I work on a lot for a project, or right before bed, my subconscious is still there, filled with lines of code, and my dreams are laced with numbers and sequences. I often wake up with the new ability to solve a problem that was bothering me in the code the night before, my mind having worked it out somehow while I slept.” This has happened to me on multiple occasions and people think I am absolutely nuts when I tell them, so having someone else say this – even if it is a fictional character – made me feel validated.
Lara Parker wrote “Vagina Problems” because talking about it is taboo and she wants to help normalize it. She suffers from endometriosis, a condition that effects 1 in 10 women, yet it took her years and years to be properly diagnosed all the while she had to deal with terrible pain that no one was really able to help her with. I can’t even imagine!
I haven’t read any romance novels like this one in a while. The stories are always a little off the wall in these, and this story was no different. The characters always tend to have names you’d otherwise not hear, and this story was no different. It had kind of 3 stories going on at once. The story of Alaric and Caterine, the conflict between Alaric and his family (mainly his father) and then the fictional piece that Alaric was writing about Erica and Charles – a historical fiction romance.
Girl Gone Viral is the 2nd book in the Modern Love series. I had not read the first one and it did take me a bit to get into reading this one and I am not sure if it is because I was missing some backstory or not, but once things started to take off, I was hooked. Katrina is an investor that likes to keep things private and stay to herself. When she finds herself politely sharing a table with a guy at a coffee shop, another patron tweets the whole thing as if it is a first date and they just met their soulmate, causing the encounter to go viral. Will the public figure out that it is Katrina? She skirts off for a secret getaway with her bodyguard – the one who knows everything about her and is there to protect her. She is a client. But is that all she is? Katrina is determined to get to know Jas more and get him to talk about his feelings… but was going to his family’s farm to escape really the right thing to do?