Stop! the Watch by the Editors of Klutz Press, 1993.

This book is part of the classic children’s hobby and activity series from Klutz Press. Originally, this book came with a working stopwatch in bright colors, which was attached to the book at the hole in the upper left corner. Unfortunately, I broke my stopwatch years ago, but I liked the book, and I got a new stopwatch to use with it.

The book begins with instructions for using the stopwatch and then offers various timed activities and goals for kids to reach while using the stopwatch. Most of the activities involved kids performing various simple stunts and trying to do them as fast as possible, like counting to 126 by 7s, writing a verse from The Song of Hiawatha, tying shoelaces, singing “Happy Birthday” to Rumpelstiltskin, walking up a flight of stairs with a book balanced on the head, and drawing a picture of a gorilla. There are places in the book to record your efforts and your own time records and the records of your friends. (You can see in my copy where I made notes.)

There are also activities that participants are supposed to perform for a very specific amount of time, trying to keep as close to the allotted time as possible without actually watching the watch. For example, one of the events is hollering the word “Eeeeellllllskin” for exactly 17 seconds.

There are also some events that are meant to be completed by two people acting as a team, like leapfrogging, carrying your partner ten steps, singing “Jingle Bells” while alternating words between partners, and throwing something weird back and forth.

The original edition of this book included time records set by the author and others at Klutz HQ. Readers could compete against these records and try to beat them, and later editions of the book were printed with new records set by readers who reported their results.

In the back of the book, there is a section explaining how to time daily events and predict about how much time you will spend doing those things throughout your life, like how much time you spend in the bathroom. Some of these things can be enlightening, like how much time you spend watching tv (Is it too much?), being emotionally upset (Have you been stressing too much?), or stalling when you’re supposed to be doing something else. There are also some educational ways of using time. The book explains how to tell how fast the car you’re traveling in is driving without looking at the spedometer by timing the distance between mile markers. It also explains how to tell how high you’ve tossed a ball by timing how long it takes to hit the ground.

The book is available to borrow and read online through Internet Archive.