When I found out that I won a contest where I could pick out five books from Quarto Knows, Kawaii Doodle Class was my easiest choice because I had already put it on my daughter’s Amazon wishlist.  According to the Urban Dictionary, “kawaii” is an adjective in Japanese meaning “pretty; cute; lovely; charming; dear; darling; pet”.  This book, written by Zainab Khan, contains step-by-step directions for drawing a multitude of kawaii characters under the following categories:

• Adorable Food & Drinks
• Lovable Nature
• Cheerful Doodle Monsters
• Everyday Cute
• Charming Holiday Decorations

My daughter made a birthday card for her friend using the cupcake doodle instructions:

Kawaii, right?

She also made a Christmas card using the Christmas tree instructions:

Love the kawaii star on top!

Once you have mastered the simple kawaii smiley face, the possibilities are endless!

k just turned eleven years old yesterday, and it is not as easy to find presents for this “tween” age.  I would definitely recommend Kawaii Doodle Class for tweens, as well as adults who have an affinity for the kawaii aesthetic (such as myself!).

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If you spend any amount of time on Instagram or Pinterest, examples of beautiful hand-lettering abound.  Erica Tighe is a talented artist/hand-letterer, and she wrote a newly released book called Written By Hand.  According to the subtitle, the book contains “Techniques & Tips to Make Your Everyday Handwriting More Beautiful”, and I found that it delivers just that.

The book starts with an interesting general overview about handwriting.  In this tech-age, handwriting needs to be practiced and appreciated more than ever!

There are several practice pages where you can write directly in the book.  The pages are nice and thick so your pen will not bleed through.

The author goes through step-by-step in teaching each letter, both upper and lower case, as well as numerals, for three types of fonts: Sans Serif, Bold Serif, and Script.

I always thought of my handwriting as “pretty good”, but I never really learned how to do calligraphy.  This book has a chapter dedicated to faux calligraphy–no calligraphy pen necessary!  I had read before that it is all about the downstroke line, but practicing with this book made it clearer to me.

Here is a chalkboard sign I made for my daughter’s upcoming birthday.  I still need to practice more, but I like it!

Here is another chalkboard sign where I tried to incorporate some of the techniques in the book.

I like how the author encourages the reader to get playful and creative with your handwriting.  The point is not to attempt to exactly replicate someone else’s handwriting, but to develop your own unique style.  Written By Hand is a wonderful tool that is full of inspiring ideas as well as fundamental basics.

For our December advent countdown, I have been trying to do different and fun activities each day with the kids.  This has not been 100% successful, as sometimes we are too busy or I just did not have enough time to plan.  Thankfully, k and n are pretty understanding.

One of the activities I did have time to plan for came from the newly published book, Math Lab for Kids, by Rebecca Rapoport and J.A. Yoder.  

I was fortunate to win five books from Quarto Knows, and this was of my choices.  The subtitle appealed to me: “Fun, Hand-On Activities For Learning With Shapes, Puzzles, and Games”.  When I showed it to my kids, they were immediately drawn to it.  k is more of my math girl and n is more of my science/engineering boy, but they both were excited to do the activities.

The book is divided into nine chapters:

1. Geometry: Learn About Shapes
2. Topology: Mind-Bending Shapes
3. Color Maps Like a Mathematician
4. Stitching Curves
5. Fantastic Fractals
6. Terrific Tangrams
7. Toothpick Puzzles
8. The Game of Nim
9. Graph Theory

Each chapter has three to eight “labs” or activities associated with it.  For our advent activity, I chose the first chapter, which includes “Prisms and pyramids and Platonic solids, oh my!”

The hands-on labs include easy to follow directions on how to make various geometric shapes with just toothpicks and gumdrops.  I really appreciated how easy it was for me to gather the materials.  I already had toothpicks at home, so I just had to pick up a bag of gumdrops during my holiday shopping!

The kids were excited to get to work.

After n made some of the shapes, he wanted to take a more creative route and created this masterpiece called “A Man Walking His Dogs”.

This is k looking through her dodecahedron.  That night, she took the book to bed with her because she wanted to look through the rest of the chapters!

The recommended grade levels for this book are 2-5, and I would say that is about right. This book would be good for both kids who are interested in math as well as those who think math is boring, as it presents the subject in a fun way that makes it appealing to everyone.