Here’s a selection of activity books kindly sent for review by GMC distributors

How to Draw All the Things for kids
How to Draw Modern Flowers for kids
Alli Koch
Blue Star Press
All young children are creative but as they get older they become inhibited and want things to ‘look right’, no matter what we teachers say in their early years.
Now here are two books by Alli Koch that will help them to draw confidently. The first is a general one with items such as vehicles, items of clothing, animals such as a hedgehog, cat or dog, a whale and a turtle, a dragon even.
The second features flowers from lavender to lotus, and marigold to magnolia. (I like the way each flower is assigned a meaning – a marigold is ‘the flower of creativity’, lotus the flower of patience, anemone the flower of ‘being true’, for instance. There are separate spreads for leaves, houseplants and more. Each of the featured items is drawn in eight, easy to follow steps and make the learning process both achievable and fun.

For younger children are:

Write-on Wipe Off My First ABC Hidden Pictures
Write-on Wipe Off My First 123 Hidden Pictures
Highlights
These two sturdily built board books come with marker pens so that little ones can develop their letter and number writing skills on the wipe-clean pages as well as have fun with solving the various puzzles, finding the hidden items in a scene or adorning items such as a cake. There are mazes, matching games and looking for items starting with a specific letter sound in the ABC book. Both uppercase and lowercase letters are presented with directional arrows above the humorous illustration on each page.
The numbers book has a double spread allocated to ‘let’s learn’ and ‘let’s find’ from 0 to 10 so for instance a child has to trace and write the number 4, count and circle 4 oranges and 4 bananas on the verso and locate the 4 cats, find and circle the four illustrated items within the big picture as well as searching for other groups of 4 therein. They’ll surely enhance both fine motor skills and observational skills with these two playful books.

Balloon Search, Banana Search, Sock Search, Lollipop Search
My First Hidden Pictures series

Playtime Puzzles, Barnyard Puzzles, Pet Puzzles
Hidden Pictures series
Highlights
Ideal for filling the odd few minutes, either on a journey, on holiday or on a dark, chilly evening are these search-and -find books.
The first series My First Hidden Pictures for the youngest age children have in addition to the thematic hidden objects to find, simple word games, drawing activities, dot-to-dots, colouring and drawing, matching and more.
The Hidden Pictures series includes pages of stickers that relate to the pages indicated and each has more than fifty hidden picture puzzles and a total of 500 objects hiding in plain sight in the themed pages that includes such funky spreads as Frosty Farm with sledging animals, Fiddling Frogs and a Community Garden among the Barnyard Puzzles. Pet Puzzles offers such zany activities as a host of felines in a beauty salon all desirous of ‘Purr-fect Nails’ (no social distancing or mask wearing here!) to colour and adorn with stickers. Meanwhile in Playtime Puzzles you can find a pair of octopuses playing table tennis with several bats, each inviting users ‘Let’s Play’ whereas ‘Catch of the Day’ has a comical coloured scene of two turtles fishing from a rowing boat bordered by small pictures of items to search the scene for.
There are hours of immersive screen-free fun between the covers of each book.