Your Life in Comics
As we’re talking about gifts to encourage creativity in their recipients, some of you may be wondering “what about the guys”? While girls may clamor for the opportunity to crochet or do beading (and boys certainly can do these things), what we think of as “crafts” often isn’t tops on the list for boys. Your Life in Comics is a good alternative!
Just as the boys can crochet, the girls certainly can make use of this book! (My nine-year-old daughter said it’s “soooo cool! I wish I had my very own copy!”) But it’s designed especially to appeal to guys. Your Life in Comics: 100 Things for Guys to Write and Draw
The fill-in-the-blank pages have spaces for adding your own dialogue and/or drawings, based on the framework of the page and text prompts. Some are serious, intended to draw out insights about the user’s life. Others are just silly, designed to foster creativity and imagination. (Homeschoolers, there’s a free teacher’s guide, too.)
Some of the pages include “footnotes” of a sort with suggested websites for further exploration. (So parents take note – supervise your children’s internet usage. Most of the sites are quite wholesome, but one does have questions and answers about puberty, which you should be aware of if the book’s recipient is fairly young.)
Very conservative readers will want to be aware that there is one page about a “best date,” one for a ghost story, and one about a Halloween costume. None of these are pages we’d make use of in our household, but they’re not reasons for us to avoid the book, either; we’d just skip those pages. All in all, it seems to be a fun way to explore creativity, especially for boys who have a low motivation to read and write.
Not sure if your children will enjoy creating comics? Take them over to the author’s website, MakeBeliefsComix.com, where they can create and print/email their own comic strips. (It’s free!)
$9.99
Disclosure: I received a free copy of the book to facilitate this review. All opinions are entirely my own.
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