My daughter is 15 this year, but we still read bedtime stories. Not every night, but at least 3 or 4 times a week. (Life is busier than it used to be!) But instead of picture books or chapter books read out loud by me, we now listen to audio books. This helps to save my voice, but also allows to me enjoy the stories a little more too.
We recently listened to books 1 to 3 of the Gryphon Chronicles by EG Foley. These are fun adventures, but are definitely a bit young, more for the older elementary school age. We also listened to Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor. This was a fantastic book and we were eager for book 2, but it is not out yet. So we started another series by the same author called Binti. We are enchanted by these reads! I would say Akata Witch is for middle school readers and Binti is for high school and beyond. These books are filled with myths, legends and traditions of Africa.
So while we listen to bedtime stories, we also do other activities. I've written about this before here on the blog, but it is one of my favorite ways to spend time with my kids, so I like talking about it. Although Jack doesn't join us anymore, but he's 17 and cranky! :-(
Querkles are a color-by-number style of coloring book. For each page, you pick five colors in a range of dark to light. We tried different colors a couple of times, but those didn't turn out very well. Picking different shades of the same color works best for these, and black is usually a decent choice for the darkest color.
Here are some of our favorite results! You don't know what you will be coloring in before hand. It is a mystery! Most of the coloring pages are composed of overlapping circles, of which you color the numbered bits. Querkles describe themselves as "A Puzzling Color-By-Number Book". We enjoy this type of coloring more than the regular coloring books. It is fun to "discover" what you are coloring about half way to the end!
Some of these pages take a couple nights of coloring to finish, and others are pretty simple and we can whip them out in one night. Of course, if we are at a really interesting part of whatever audio book we are listening too, then we are more motivated to color for longer!
And when our hands get tired from coloring, we sometimes give dot-to-dot books a go. We found these Extreme Dot-to-Dot books from Mindware to be challenging, but not confusing. (We have another dot-to-dot book that has line that cross each other and that is rather befuddling at times!)
You can probably tell that we rather enjoy the animal themed books. For these dot-to-dot we used gel pens (and sometimes glitter gel pens)! For pages with separate puzzles on each side, we each work on our own page. But there are several 2 pages spreads in these books, so we each pick a different color pen and get to work. Generally we stay on one side to keep out of each others way, but sometimes we stray onto to other side too. It makes for a unique outcome!
You can find out about some of the other activity books we have worked on in these previous blog posts. (If you are looking for ideas of things you can do with your kids, I highly recommend listening to stories and coloring!)
Kaleidoscope Sticker Mosaic Book
Stargazing Dot-to-Dot Book
