Book Review- 150+ Screen-Free Activities for Kids

Bring back playtime, all the time!

Dive into a Bubbling Swamp World. Drum on an Outdoor Sound Wall. Explore the gooeyness of Glowing Slime.

With the one-of-a-kind projects in 150+ Screen-Free Activities for Kids, your family will rediscover the spirit of imaginative play! These fun activities help develop your child’s creativity and skills–all without a screen in sight. Featuring step-by-step instructions and beautiful photographs, each budget-friendly project will keep your child entertained, engaged, and learning all day long. Best of all, no one will complain about turning off the TV or computer with such entertaining activities as:

Natural Dye Fingerpaints
Taste-Safe, Gluten-Free Playdough
Erupting Volcano Dinosaur World
Fizzy Rainbow Slush
Taste-Safe Glow Water

Complete with dozens of ideas for babies, toddlers, and school-aged children, 150+ Screen-Free Activities for Kids will help your family step away from your devices and step into endless afternoons of playtime fun!

Kids all seem to go through a phase of loving trivia, and if you’ve got kids who want to know about the tallest, biggest and weirdest things in nature, they’ll enjoy the book Once in a Blue Moon by Emily Hawkins.

The book explores wonders of astronomy, meteorology, big trees, weird animals, volcanoes and more to show off the rarest events and phenomena in the natural world.

Kids ages 7-10 will learn about the lake (Lake Hillier, on an island off Australia) that has water that’s bubblegum pink, the world’s deepst came (Veryovkina Cave in the country of Georgia) and the world’s biggest tree, a banyan in southeast India with a canopy that covers more than five acres!

Readers will learn what a blue moon is, how supernovas happen and about Haley’s comet and solar eclipses, among other space-related phenomena. Closer to home they’ll learn about stinky flowers, bleeding trees, glowing fungi and pizzly bears.

There’s content about times when it’s rained frogs (and when frogs have exploded en masse), when snow made giant snowballs all by itself and how clouds stack on themselves like pancakes. The book also explores ball lightning, sun dogs, St. Elmo’s fire and more.

I love books like this and I know kids do, too. There’s so much weird and wonderful about our world and even as adults we don’t know about all of these things. I found it fun to learn, for example, that there’s a volcano on the island of Java that not only sends out blue flames from vents near its crater, it’s also home to an acidic lake.

Illustrations by Vlad Stankovic illuminate these weird natural wonders and are sure to get kids interested in learning more about some of these remarkable animals, plants, rock formations and more.

About the book: 80 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Wide Eyed Editions. Suggested retail price $30.

Have you read?