Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This little book is very flexible as to what you can do with it. The basic and intended use is to follow a sequence of steps whereby you, part by part, draw the animal. My 9 year old grandson has no problem doing it this way. While fun, it's a very educational process in which they break up an item into its component parts and follow a sequence or steps which must be followed in order and with attention to detail. If they should learn to approach other material in this way it will do good for their problem-solving abilities in other disciplines. My 5-year old granddaughter has difficulty actually drawing each part free-form. If you are too far off in the initial steps, there is no way that you will end up with a satisfactory finished product. So we are approaching it as tracing exercises. She first traces the first form, then I move the paper and position it above step 2 (I have to hold it in place), she then traces the next step, and so on until the animal is finished. It works perfectly. My grandson also likes this approach, although he moves and holds the tracing paper in place himself. I like for them to do these small-muscle exercises. They don't do a great deal of penmanship at school and with so much of their work done on computers or tablets, I despair that they will ever have legible handwriting or hand skills that require precision. They absolutely hate more obviously academic exercises, such as penmanship, but this is an activity they enjoy from beginning to end and I'm happy that, through devious trickery, I'm achieving my goal.