Doodle Your Day

I absolutely love to doodle – when I’m on the phone, listening to a lecture or when I’m a passenger in the car or on a plane. Somehow, I always manage to put a lot of hearts into my doodles. I wonder what that means?

Scientific research proves that doodling helps people learn faster by helping them concentrate better and retain more information. Doodle Your Day ($16.99, Gibbs Smith Publishing, Ages 8 and up) written by Anita Wood and illustrated by Jennifer Kalis provides children with the essentials they need to doodle their way into creativity. Anita has written many other doodle and journal books for kids.

What you’ll love about this meaty 225-page book is that it is chock full of templates that will get your children thinking and creating in ways that are so fun they will never even suspect they are actually learning anything. Each page has a title, some clever art work and plenty of space for your young reader to doodle away. Here are just a handful of the hundreds of doodle pages in this book:

• This is What I Had for Lunch Today (with an illustration of a big empty plate to fill in)
• Step in a Puddle and Splash Your Friend Day (with an illustration of 2 large rain boots to decorate)
• Wacky Word of the Day (to use in a sentence and also illustrate)
• Opposite Day (with space to write something with the opposite hand you usually write with)
• National Gumdrop Day (with space to doodle a gumdrop family)
• Find a Jigsaw Puzzle Piece and Glue it Here (then draw more pieces around it)
• Babe Ruth Day (eat a Baby Ruth and glue the wrapper to this page)
• National Hamburger Day (fill in the illustration of a bun)
• Fight Procrastination Day (list tasks you always put off doing)
• What Kind of Bird are You? (draw it)

There are so many imaginative pages in this book (a doodle for every day of the year in fact), enough to keep readers very busy. This is the kind of book your  child will get so much use out of and when he or she finally finishes every page, will cherish as a sort of drawing and writing journal to look back on for years to come. So the next time you see your child doodling, rather than asking him to pay attention, buy him this most creative and interactive book and encourage him to doodle away.

Reviewed by Debbie Glade