Book Review – MESS – Craft Gossip

ISBN 9780399536007 RRP $13.95

I was lucky enough to receive a Galley Proof for Keri’s new book MESS. My 2 year old grabbed the book and asked if she could draw in it. I had not even read the title and snapped back NO that’s mummy’s book. She informed me it was a drawing book and proceeded to look for a pencil.

After reading the introduction I thought wow, what better way to MESS up this book than to let me 2 year old have a go.

What am I talking about?

You may be familiar with her best selling book “Wreck this Journal” where Keri provokes her readers to Wreck the journal by poking holes in pages, tearing things up and much much more.

Well MESS (the book) is pretty much the same thing, the book is filled with directions on how to MESS up the book with quirky challenges to inspire you to be creative. Not only by yourself but with others too with several pages being directed to Groups.

Edited to add: Now that my children are older I can truly appreciate the importance of children learning that imperfection is okay. I have two children who like to get things right all the time. This book is something we have revisited to show them that mess is not only creative it is also an important step in life, that can be acceptable.

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My daughter’s school has project-based finals instead of tests in the spring, and in her geometry class last year the students constructed a scale model of a town complete with three-dimensional buildings.

Of course building a paper town doesn’t have to include a geometry lesson (they also calculated the volume of their buildings) but it is a fun way to get kids to express their creativity by decorating the buildings and talking about the things they would want to include in their own town.

Putting buildings together is a test of fine-motor skills, and if kids are working on a town together they’ll need to negotiate what goes where and why.

Get started with the house printables from Kids Activities Blog. They’ve got a “plain” roof house and a “fancy” roof house to choose from. Just print, color, cut out and assemble.

You might want more than just houses in your little town, though, so I went hunting for some more printable templates you can use to make different kinds of buildings.

Brother has printable skyscrapers, cars, people, trees and lights (shown above) that are meant to be printed in color buy you can do them in black and white so kids can color them in if you want.

Printablee has another colorized set of paper buildings including different kinds of houses and something that maybe looks like a church or school.

If you’re willing and bale to pay for printables to use in your paper town, there are lots of great ones available on Etsy. Ludlow Prints has a collection with a school, grocery store, bakery and other buildings, while Paper Fun By Yumi includes things like a hospital, fire department and police station (essential if you’ve done a community helpers unit!).

Tiger Bee Learning has a printable set with 20 different buildings, including a bank, library, museum and zoo to name a few, as well as a blank template for kids to design their own buildings. Once you have the basics of making a piece of paper into a 3D building down, kids are sure to want to make their own buildings to add to the town.

Older kids can also write about why they picked the buildings they did, and littler kids will have fun building their town over and over again.

[Photo: Brother]

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