Perfect for the recommended age range.Ok, yes, for the most creative process, you give your kid a blank piece of paper and let them go to town. We do plenty of that. You can also buy coloring books at the dollar store. However, there is a certain age range were a kid (at least mine) wants to create a recognizable picture and they can’t do it on their own. You can give them a coloring book with blank pictures, and everything starts out fine, but they rapidly lose patience and their coloring gets messier and messier and they never complete a picture. At 3 and a half, my daughter knows she should be coloring in the lines, and wants to do it, but her crayon skills aren’t quite refined enough to do it perfectly so she gets frustrated. Enter: the Kumon coloring books.This book starts with a single shape to color a specified color within a larger area of that same color. This meets all of the criteria for a three year old who wants to make a picture. The single space is just enough for her to put effort into staying in the lines but the matching color covers up any little accidents she makes. The smaller areas allow her to actually finish a picture in a single sitting before she gets impatient and starts scribbling. As they progress through the book there are more spaces of different colors on the same page. ‘By the end of the book, there are odd shape spaces with the standard black outline more like a regular coloring book. It still isn’t an entire picture to color so they can complete it in a reasonable amount of time.You need to start at the beginning of the book and progress through as the pictures get more difficult. They can’t pick and choose what picture they want to color and we don’t leave it with the regular paper and crayons for free time coloring. We can do one to two pictures in a sitting before my daughter wants to move on to doing something else. We focus on staying in the lines and doing a good job. If you think your kids would rocket through this book, they’re probably ready for a standard coloring book (or not quite ready to practice staying in the lines).
