All You Need Is a Pencil
Joe Rhatigan, author
Joe Rhatigan has authored more than fifteen books for children and adults, including Don't Unravel When You Travel and Out-of-This-World Astronomy. He has also produced several best-selling books and series, including 101 Places You Gotta See Before You're 12!, The Boo Boo Book, and the My Very Favorite Art Book series. Joe has been a poet, a teacher, a marketing manager, and a newspaper boy. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with his wife and three children.
Read more about Joe Rhatigan.
Sugar Pop Ribbons
In addition to traveling out of town to visit my in laws on a regular basis, we also typically travel long distances in the winter and summer breaks. My kids have sat for many hours in a car driving to another state and flew internationally as well. Typically they pass the time by playing games on their tablets, but I love the concept of giving them a pencil and let their creativity take over. Unfortunately, my son is too young to use the book so we could not test it on him. However, my 8 year old daughter is the prefect age for it. I gave her the book for the hour long drive to visit the grandparents. During that time, she flipped through the book and selected a couple of pages to complete. She's especially a fan of anything that involves drawing.
For instance, she loved drawing Fast Food. On two blank pages, she had 5 minutes to draw pictures of as many types of food as she could think of. To make it more difficult, I told her that if I could not name it properly from her drawings, then it did not count. If she could do 10 successful ones, she would be rewarded with an ice cream cone. She also like drawing Space Jam. For it, she needed to imagine what traffic jam in space would look like and doodle it onto the book. Instead of wasting time on the tablet, I love that my daughter got to use her creativity and had fun doing it. We love this book and we would recommend it without any hesitations.
Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-62354-008-1
Ages: 7-10
Page count: 144
7 x 9