Active Play – Dr. Crafts Active Play book review

 

Dr. Craft’s Active Play book is a book chock full of great ideas that are easy to set up, use things that most of us have on hand or can be easily adapted with things from around your house, and help get children moving and active. The Active Play! Fun Physical Activities for Young Children  ($39.00) is great for a daycare or school setting or is perfect for breaking up those long rainy homeschool days when you are stuck inside!

I love how the games and activities in this book work for a wide range of ages. I used this book as a family fun lesson each time we pulled it out. All of my children aged 2 years to 10 years loved every lesson and were engaged anywhere from 20-60 minutes each time. I usually picked two games to do during each session.

I also lent my sister this book for her to try with her in home daycare. She and her children loved it as well. She played games such as “Land and Sea” and “Laundry Pick Up” with her preschoolers. She used the DVD that is included with the book to play the “Stop and Go” game as well as to show the children how to play the other games. She told me that now, two weeks later, her children still ask to play the games again!

There is a great check list type portion to this book that breaks down the games by what skill they work on and even reproducible take home pages for use with your school children. I loved the easy to follow 20 week lesson plan that is written out in the back. It helped me to know what games worked well together to offer a well rounded lesson.

But, I have saved the best, or at least in my opinion, the best for last!!! So, after having used this book for awhile I found myself one rainy yucky Missouri spring day in need of a few minutes to tidy up the house before my husband got home and yet I still had 5 children that had been cooped up all day on my hands. So, I decided to try something new.

I called in my older girls and gave them the Dr. Crafts Active Play book and told them to pick two games that they could gather the supplies for, explain to their siblings, and play together. And left them to it. A little while later they came to me and told me they were ready. So, I grabbed my camera and sat back to see what happened. And to my surprise they were able to carry it out.

This, to me, is a great feature of this book for the homeschool mom. My older girls (10 and 8 years) were able to pick up the book and do the entire “lesson” time with their younger siblings. The pictures in this post are from that day and I think you can see how much fun they all had.

I really have enjoyed this review and it came at a perfect time of year here in the mid-west. We have been stuck in all winter long due to the cold and while we are now warming up, things are still very wet and cool many days. This book was great for helping the children to get some energy out and breaking up the monotony of the long winter season. I hope that you will check it out if you are looking for some new ideas to liven up your homeschool day.

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