Tricky Pix: Do-It-Yourself Trick Photography by Paula Weed and Carla Jimison, 2001.
This book is part of the classic children’s hobby and activity series from Klutz Press and explains how to perform trick photography. Originally, this book came with a real camera that could be used to take trick pictures. The camera was a film camera instead of a digital camera, using 35mm film, but the film was not provided.
Now, digital cameras have almost entirely replaced film camera for popular photography, and film is actually much harder to come by, and not as many places offer film development services. In the very early 2000s, when this book was first published, digital photography was just starting to take hold, and digital cameras were more expensive, so a kid’s first camera was still likely to be a film camera. In just a few more years, that shifted abruptly with the increasing popularity of cell phone cameras and further developments that made digital cameras increasingly affordable for general use. The beginning of the book explains how the camera works and how to load the film.
The fact that this book was designed to be used with a film camera is important because this style of trick photography relies on physical illusions, not images that are digitally altered with Photoshop or similar software. In a way, this makes the pictures more interesting because they are largely unaltered from their original form. That is, you’re seeing what the camera saw at the moment that the picture was taken. The tricks involve using different perspectives and camera angles to achieve the illusions.
Strategic poses and the use of physical objects to block part of the scene can be used to create illusions like disembodied heads, people with extra limbs, or people with really long legs or bodies.
An often-used trick for making people look tiny enough to be picked up or stepped on by another person involves forced perspective – strategic positioning the subjects so that there is physical distance between them but no visual cues to indicate just how much distance there is between them so relative sizes are difficult to gauge.
When images in this book are altered, it’s with the old-fashioned method of literally cutting and pasting them onto each other, something that is now done digitally.
Personally, I enjoyed the fact that there was less of a reliance on software and digital technology in the production of these photographs. I think that learning how to do things without relying on technology to do most of the work can encourage creativity, and in particular, the use of physical illusions like forced perspective is also educational. Artists need to understand the use of physical space, perspective, and lighting, and these photographic tricks demonstrate these concepts well. Even though this book doesn’t make use of digital photography, any of the tricks in this book could also be performed when taking pictures with a digital camera.
The book is available to borrow and read online through Internet Archive.
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.
I love nonfiction books about unusual and very specific topics! This is a non-fiction book about fools and jesters throughout history. The book begins in a museum, where a class of schoolchildren are being shown a collection of jester statues. One of the statues, Frambert, comes to life and tells the children about his life and the lives other other jesters.
Fools and jesters were the comedians of the past. It was a job for women as well as men. There were different types of professional fools. Some of them were people with unusual appearances, such as dwarfs or people who were unusually tall. Sometimes, university professors took part-time jobs as jesters to supplement their income (teaching has always been a notoriously under-paid profession), using their public speaking skills and knowledge to make intellectual jokes or jokes based on wordplay. Some of them were very successful and made so much money as entertainers that they gave up their teaching jobs. (So, if you’ve discovered that you make more money producing humorous YouTube videos about history than you would as a history teacher or at least find it a useful supplement to your teaching salary, understand that this is just the modern equivalent.)
Among the individual jesters described in the book was Mathurine, a French jester from the 1600s. She liked to dress like an Amazonian warrior from Greek legends as part of her act.
Frambert is a fictional jester, but he describes how he became a jester to demonstrate what a jester’s life was like. According to his fictional biography, his talent for mimicry and making jokes was noticed when he was young, and he was selected for training as a professional fool. When he was 19 years old, he officially became a jester. His children also became jesters after him. Because he was well-loved by his king, he was given a generous pension: a village of his own to govern, which sometimes did happen to favorite jesters.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
Juggling for the Complete Klutz by John Cassidy, 1977.
This is the book that started the Klutz Press publishing company as well as the book that inspired the name that I often use online, Jestress. The term “jestress” (which even I have never been sure is proper English) refers to a female jester. Back when I was in high school, I learned how to juggle from this book. In fact, I became obsessed with juggling and jesters (I often become obsessed about odd and random topics), and I started giving myself that nickname. (I’m not the only one who uses that handle, so not every “Jestress” on the Internet is another incarnation of me, but I have used it in several other settings.) However, the Klutz books in general were a regular feature of my youth, as they have been for many people from about the 1980s onward.
Klutz Press began as a small outfit, and the very first book they offered was this guide for learning how to juggle. The author of the book used to teach English, and as the intro to the book explains, he started teaching his students how to juggle as a fun exercise in class. John Cassidy learned how to juggle in college and used it to entertain guests on rafting trips. The author and his friends printed up more copies of his guide to juggling and began selling them. Their company branched out from there.
By the time I bought my copy of the book in the 1990’s, it came with 3 cube-shaped bean bags to use for juggling. The hole in the upper left corner of the book is where the bag holding the bean bags was originally attached. The bean bags are one of the best features of the book. They are weighed well for juggling, which makes them easier to control than other small juggling balls I’ve tried. A friend of mine got a later edition of the food from the 2000s, and the bean bags are a little different – the cloth is more velvety, and they have a different feel to them, like they’re slightly lighter. I prefer the ones I own.
The very first step for learning to juggle in the book is to master “The Drop” – throw all of the bean bags in the air and just let them fall to the ground without trying to catch them. The goal of mastering this is to get used to the idea of dropping things because it’s going to happen a lot while you’re learning. The cube shape of the provided bean bags helps to keep them from rolling too far when you drop them, which happens a lot when you’re learning to juggle. When I was in high school, I started teaching a friend to juggle, and we both agreed that the learning process actually gave our leg muscles a good workout; you really feel them when you have to bend over that many times to pick up dropped bean bags. (The book mentions this later in the section called “Special Problems”, but we considered this a bonus. It’s like doing a bunch of toe touches with more exciting moments in between when you’re throwing stuff in the air.)
From there, the book guides you through mastering the scooping motion of juggling tosses and how not to panic when you realize that the hand that is going to catch a tossed bean bag is already holding one. Successful juggling is largely a matter of timing, maintaining even motions, and eventually, letting muscle memory take over. You toss one ball (or bean bag), and then you toss the next one with the other hand when the first one reaches the top of its arc, freeing that hand for catching. Then, you keep doing that, over and over, to keep all of the juggling balls in motion.
It might feel impossible at first, when you’re still dropping everything, but speaking as someone who learned how to do this about 20 years ago, muscle memory is very strong, and if you build the right habits and keep at it consistently, you will not only eventually master it, but it will feel as natural as riding a bicycle. I don’t even have to look at my juggling balls or my hands while I’m juggling, and I can comfortably carry on a conversation with someone else while juggling, because my hands know what to do with minimal instruction from my brain.
The book has tips for getting around difficulties in learning to juggle, and when you’re feeling more confident, instructions for going even beyond basic juggling. The book explains different types of juggling cycles, how to juggle four or five balls, how to juggle other items besides balls and bean bags, and how to juggle with a partner. The section about clubs is particularly interesting because it not only describes the techniques of club juggling but how to make your own set of juggling clubs from plastic bottles and wooden sticks or dowels.
The book is available online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
This book is part of the Traditions Around the World series, which explains different aspects of culture around the world. Each book in the series focuses on a different cultural topic and then explains traditions regarding that topic in different countries. This one is all about games of various kinds.
The games are organized into sections by continent, and the book covers a variety of board games, party games, and sports. Not all of the games are explained in detail. Many of them have brief descriptions, explaining what types of games they are and when they are usually played, and there are some with complete instructions.
I was originally interested in the histories of the some of the games, but the book doesn’t always explain the history of games or tell how old they are. There is some of that type of information, but some of it is a little vague, just mentioning that these are games are played or have been played in certain countries. Of course, when dealing with such a broad topic in a short book, it can be difficult to go into detail on everything, and when it comes to cultural topics, like games, their origins aren’t always known or obvious. Many games have their origins in many different countries. Sometimes, it’s because they are based on such universal concepts that many different societies naturally come up with their own variations (like games involving tossing a ball or hiding and seeking). Other times, it’s because the games have been played in many different countries over the centuries, and everywhere they’ve been played, rules have been altered or pieces and boards redesigned to take their modern form, like Checkers and Chess. Sometimes, this has happened so many times, it can be difficult to say exactly how the very oldest forms were played like with Backgammon. This book mention that people in China play Backgammon, but it’s actually a game played all over the world, related to ancient board games from Ancient Rome, Egypt, and the Middle East. The book doesn’t really go into its history.
I think that the two strength of this book are the variety of games it covers and the pictures it shows of real people playing different games. The book discusses ancient board games like Go (China and Japan), unusual sports like hurling (from Ireland), and children’s playground games, like How Deep Is the Water? (from Germany) as well as some common games that are played around the world, like jacks (an ancient game that has been played in many variations, called variously knucklebones, jackstones, etc.). Some games and game concepts are universal, but there are some unique gems that are particular to certain areas. Seeing the pictures makes the games come alive and also makes the descriptions easier to understand. That is one of the things that I really like about children’s books, and I wish more adult books would make better use of pictures. They really are worth a thousand words.
This book is part of a series about games played around the world. The series also covers sports and other, related activities. This book is specifically about the traditional games and sports of China.
China’s history goes back thousands of years, and so does the history of games and toys enjoyed there by generations of children. The book begins with a brief history of China. This book was written in the 1990s, and it contains a brief description of China’s one-child policy, which controlled the sizes of Chinese families and impacted the way in which children were raised. It also explains some important Chinese festivals, such as the Lunar New Year, Lantern Festival, and Dragon Boat Festival. It explains the origins of these festivals and how people celebrate, including the roles of children in the celebrations.
I most enjoyed the sections about board games. Some of the oldest board games in the world come from China. Some of these games are also played in Japan under different names. For example, the game Weiqi is known as Go in Japan, and this is the name that is also most familiar to Americans. Chinese Chess uses different pieces from the international form of chess. The book mentions Chinese Checkers also, but it doesn’t explain that it was not actually invented in China, even though it is played there today. (The “Chinese” in the title was a marketing gimmick in the United States, to make the game seem more exotic. It’s actually a German variation of the American game Halma, which was based on an older English game called Hoppers.) Majiang (called Mah-Jongg in the United States) is another well-known Chinese game. Sometimes, in the United States, people play it as a solitaire game on their computes, but the real-life board game is a multiplayer game with several variations.
When I was in school, I had a teacher who was fond of tangrams, which is a kind of puzzle game that involves using a set of basic shapes to produce different forms or pictures of objects. The book demonstrates how to make a tangram set and how to use it.
The earliest kites made in China were made for serious, religious purposes, sending prayers, signs, or messages to the heavens. Later, the Chinese also used them to give military signals. Later, paper kites became a popular form of amusement and folk art. They can be made in many different forms. Some of them even make musical sounds, caused by the wind passing over holes placed in the bamboo frame of the kite.
The Chinese also use puppets in different styles. The history of puppet theater also goes back thousands of years, and puppets made for puppet theaters can be very elaborate. Sometimes, plays are performed with shadow puppets controlled by sticks and sometimes with marionettes or hand puppets. The appearance of a puppet and provide clues to the puppet’s character. For example, puppets with red faces represent brave characters while ones with white faces may be cunning and treacherous and ones with black faces are loyal.
Popular sports in China include soccer (called “football” everywhere but in North America) and badminton. China is also famous for its martial arts and some spectacular forms of acrobatics.
From Junk to Jewelry by Beth, Leah, and and Mary Johnson, 1991.
I bought this book at a school book fair when I was a kid, and we used some of the projects in the book for Brownies and birthday parties. They are pretty easy craft activities that use basic materials that people have around their houses. As the title indicates, the focus is on reusing things that might otherwise be thrown away to make something new. It uses the term “recycling” rather than “upcycling” (which I don’t remember hearing in the 1990s – “recycle” or “reuse” were more common terms), but that’s the basic idea. Some projects require some additional materials beyond the “junk”, like earring, pin, or barrette backings, but the main decorative part of the jewelry pieces are made from recycled materials. The projects in the book are divided into different levels of difficulty: beginning, intermediate, and advanced.
The two beginning projects are a beaded necklace with beads made from rolled paper (mine is shown in the picture) and pins or barrettes made from papier-mache colored with paint or marker.
The intermediate section has instructions for basic friendship bracelets and sgraffito earrings. “Sgraffito” is an artistic technique that involves scratching the top layer of a project to show the colors of a lower layer. Now, you can buy ready-made kits with special scratchable paper or cards that shows rainbow colors underneath, but I don’t recall ever seeing these kits when I was a kid in the 1990s. This project produces a similar look, but you have to apply the colors yourself using crayons. You start with a piece of heavy paper, tagboard, or an old file folder, you color rainbow stripes with crayon, pressing hard as you color. Then, you color over the rainbow colors with black crayon until the rainbow underneath doesn’t show. Then, you cut out the shapes of the earrings and scratch a design on the surface, scratching away the black surface so that the colors show underneath. Then, you glue the colored paper shapes to pieces cut from a plastic milk carton for stability and attach earring wires.
The advanced section has instructions for two more types of friendship bracelets (the v-design, which I’ve made many times myself with yarn, and the bridge design) and making origami earrings using either origami paper or colorful wrapping paper and earring backings.
The end of the book has a collection of tips for making junk jewelry of various kinds for kids of all ages. It describes various types of “junk” you can collect around the house, like old buttons, pieces of broken toys or broken jewelry, pictures cut from magazines, and bits of cloth, lace, cord, or bows. When you’ve assembled your “junk”, you consider how you can arrange it decoratively, and then glue the pieces to a piece of plastic cut from a milk jug. Then, you can attach pin backings or earring backings so you can wear it.
Environmentalism and the concept of recycling were gaining increasing importance through the 1990s and were heavily promoted in schools when I was a kid. Although not every project in this book uses entirely recycled materials, these were common sorts of projects we would do in scouts and craft classes, and they can be a lot of fun even for kids today. When I was a Brownie, we spent a weekend at a Girl Scout camp with girls from other troops, and one of our activities was creating and trading “swaps” – decorative pins we made ourselves from bits and pieces of things like this. Each troop had its own swap design, and we would trade our swaps with each other and wear them around as signs of our new friendships. I can’t remember what my troop’s swaps looked like anymore because I traded away all of the ones I’d made myself, but I still have the swaps that I got in return. No two look alike. There were pins made from old puzzle pieces, popsicle sticks with stuff glued to them, macrame rope made to look like little faces, plain safety pins with colorful beads added, etc. These are good projects to encourage creativity. If the kids are bored this summer, try some of these projects or come up with some creative twists of your own!
The Daring Book forGirls by Andrea J. Buchanan and Miriam Peskowitz, 2007.
This is an activity/hobby book for children, especially for girls, but really, full of activities that boys could enjoy, too. It’s often sold in sets with a companion book, The Dangerous Book for Boys. These books follow in the tradition of earlier activity/hobby books like The American Boy’s Handy Book and The American Girl’s Handy Book by the Beard siblings. Some of the activities in these modern books are similar to ones included in historical children’s activity/hobby books, but there are some notable differences. Although The Daring Book for Girls includes sports and outdoor activities, it has more scientific and academic information than The American Girl’s Handy Book.
The differences between these books show changes that have taken place in society, the activities that adults want to promote for children, and the types of activities that children can actually use in the 120 years between the times when the two books were published. For example, 19th century how-to books for girls tended to include instructions for making several different types of decorative embroidery stitches. In this book, there is just one paragraph dedicated to sewing stitches, tacked into the end of the section about different types of knots, and the stitches they show are very simple stitches that can be used for basic repairs to ripped clothing. The authors of the 19th century activity books for girls seemed to be trying to introduce girls to genteel and practical pastimes and healthy physical activities. The authors of The Daring Book for Girls explain in their introduction that they wanted to introduce 21st century girls to more nostalgic pastimes that don’t involve today’s technology, like cell phones, video games, and the Internet because they feel like modern childhoods are too high-pressure and push kids to grow up too fast.
I like to explain the contents of books so that people will know whether they would like to read them in more detail. It’s difficult to describe the contents of The Daring Book for Girls succinctly because the contents are extensive, and they are not grouped into convenient categories. Like in The Dangerous Book for Boys, it’s more like reading a very long magazine with isolated articles, although some of the articles are related to each other. It did strike me that more of an effort was made in this book to put some related topics next to each other. For example, Building a Campfire is immediately followed by Campfire Songs, and Reading Tide Charts is immediately followed by Making a Seine Net for fishing.
Because it would be difficult for me to explain everything in this book without basically copying the entire table of contents, which would take quite a lot of space to do, I’ll just hit some of the highlights by describing them in sections that the book doesn’t have but which explain the types of activities and information covered in this book. All of the types of activities that I describe below are included in the book, but there is also more in the book than I could take the time and space to describe in detail.
Useful Skills and Knowledge
There are instructions for different types of knots and stitches, tips for assembling a useful toolbox that can be used to building things or making repairs, how to change a tire, how to write a letter, and basic first aid.
There are two sections with phrases, idioms, and terms of endearment in French and Spanish. These sections are more for fun and getting girls interested in learning languages than a functional guide to speaking a language. However, there are other sections with information that will be useful in school, like the sections of Math Tricks, Greek and Latin Root Words, and Books That Will Change Your Life.
As expected in a book for girls, there are tips and information related to clothes and hair styles, like How to Tie a Sari and Chiton, Putting Your Hair Up With a Pencil, Tying a Bandana, and Japanese T-Shirt Folding. However, I disagree with the advice in the section called The Daring Girls Guide to Danger about high heels. Most of that section is about doing things that are a little scary but can lead to greater confidence, like standing up for yourself or someone else, riding a roller coaster, or seeing a scary movie, but I don’t like the advice to wear high heels. Their logic is that it gets easier with practice, which may be true for most people, but I have to say that I’m in my 30s, and the only type of heels I’ve ever been able to wear without turning an ankle are low and thick. Otherwise, I have to wear flats, and I’m not the only woman who says that. Wearing high heels for extended periods is hard on the feet and can lead to foot problems later in life, so I favor being practical. In my opinion, some things just aren’t worth getting used to, and girls would be better off in the future for not starting that now.
In spite of the authors’ assertion that they don’t want girls to grow up too fast, there are some tips and information that are focused on gaining grown-up skills and preparing for a career, like public speaking, learning Roberts Rules of Order to conduct meetings, learning how to negotiate a salary, and understanding financial information like stocks, bonds, and interest. The section about how to have a lemonade stand not only contains recipes for the lemonade and other treats to sell but how to calculate profits.
There is also advice for girls about how to talk to boys. Some of it is the kind of advice that I wish that boys would be given about talking to girl. For example, the book says, “Some girls are told that boys are different” and that girls need to be into things that boys like in order for boys to like them. I think that, sometimes, boys and girls are taught too much to think of each other as homogeneous groups, that all boys like certain things like sports and all girls like certain things like dolls and romantic movies, and that they each need to do certain things, talk about certain things, or not talk about certain things in order to get people to like them. I think kids should be taught to think of each other more as individuals with individual personalities and interests, whether they’re boys or girls, and not to try to do things that they think are pleasing to all boys or all girls. Nobody really needs to please everyone anyway. No girl needs to get all boys to like her, and no boy needs to get all girls to like him. It’s enough to learn how to bond with people you like. If you want someone to like you, ask them about the things they personally like and tell them about the things you personally like. That’s how you find people who are compatible with you. As the book says:
“Many things are said of boys: Boys like sports, boys are messy, boys don’t have any feelings, boys like trucks, boys don’t like girly things, boys like to run around and eat gross food. Whatever the specific generalization, the point of these notions about boys is to set them apart from girls as being entirely different.
Similar statements are made about girls: Girls like pink, girls like flowers, girls are neat and clean, girls are frivolous, girls are emotional. Are any of these things true about all girls? Of course not. But, it’s easier to think about boys and girls as being entirely different than it is to think about boys and girls as having lots of common ground.”
The book says that, depending on how a girl feels about boys, she could ignore them, be friends with them, or even consider romance with them, but “Wherever you are on the spectrum of how you feel about boys, do treat all of your friends, boys and girls, with kindness. This has gone out of fashion, and that’s a sad mistake. Overall, the truth is that there’s no great mystery about boys. Boys are people, and like all people, they are complicated. And that’s what makes being friends with other people interesting: you get to learn about how other people think and act, and, in the process, learn a little bit more about yourself.”
One of the stereotypes about boys is that they aren’t as good with relationships as girls are, but I think that this is partly due to the advice that they’re given about relationships. After comparing the advice about girls given in The Dangerous Book for Boys and the advice about boys in The Daring Book for Girls, I think that both boys and girls should take the advice in The Daring Book for Girls.
Games
The book provides rules and tips for outdoor games, including Four Square, fourteen variations of Tag, Hopscotch, Tetherball, and Jump Rope (which includes jump rope rhymes, and there are separate sections for Double Dutch and Chinese Jump Rope). There are card games, like Hearts and Gin. There are also rules for playing Jacks, Darts, and Hand Clap Games.
There is a special section about slumber party games, which includes the classic Truth or Dare and a couple of games of the spooky variety, Bloody Mary and Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board. Young girls often like to do spooky things to scare each other when they’re staying up late at night. Boys don’t usually do this stuff, but girls often do when they’re unsupervised at sleepovers or summer camp. The spooky types of “games” are really psychological tricks, and they seem much less mysterious and scary when you know how they work (Bloody Mary makes use of the “Strange Face Illusion“, which is admittedly still an eerie sensation when you’re an adult who knows what to expect and that it’s all a trick of the mind), so they tend to be at their maximum popularity when girls are in their tween and early teen years, old enough to get a little thrill from doing something a bit scary but not yet old enough to have learned why they work and have the mystery taken out of them. The book explains a little about the concept of levitation and the superstitions surrounding it for Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board, and it ends by calling the effect a “magic trick, a phenomenon based in real-world explanations and techniques”, but it doesn’t go into details about the real-world explanation behind it, so it doesn’t ruin the sense of mystery for the girls who want to try it. There is also a section of advice for telling ghost stories that is separate from the slumber party section, but good for sleep-overs and camp-outs.
Sports and Exercise
The book provides rules for basketball, netball, softball, and bowling.
It also explains five basic karate moves, some basic yoga, and how to do cartwheels and back walk-overs.
Outdoor Activities
There are sections with activities related to camping out, like Sleep Outs, how to build a campfire, campfire songs, two ways to make a sit-upon, how to paddle a canoe, and how to go hiking, climbing, and bird watching. As I mentioned above, the book also explains how to read a tide chart and how to make and fish with a seine net.
There are also instructions for making clubhouses and forts, setting up a tree swing, rollerskating, and how to make traditional daisy chains and ivy crowns.
Science and Technology
The book explains some natural and scientific concepts, such as weather and the Periodic Table of Elements.
There are instructions for creating projects of the type that would be good for a science fair, like a Lemon-Powered Clock, things to do with Vinegar and Baking Soda, how to demonstrate capillary action with paper flowers, and how to make a lamp, lantern, or flashlight with batteries.
History and Geography
The book covers the Bill of Rights and the 50 states of the United States and also has some information about Canada. There are also sections about the countries of Africa and the South Sea Islands.
All of the historical people or interesting people from around the world described in the book are women. The section about pirates describes famous female pirates from history. There is a section about female scientists and inventors and one about famous female Olympic athletes, and there are several sections about famous Queens of the Ancient World. There is a section about Modern Women Leaders from around the world and one section about what modern princesses are like and what they do, giving girls a more realistic reference for what princesses are beyond the usual fairy tale images. There are also stories and mini biographies about interesting and inspirational historical women, like Joan of Arc, and others that are related to other topics that the book covers. For instance, the section about first aid is followed by short biographies about Clara Barton and Florence Nightingale.
Spies and Secret Codes
The book discusses female spies from history, and there is some information about secret codes, but much of the sections about spies discusses assembling a spy team, the types of roles required for a team, and the skills that the members should have. There is also a section about “Spy Lingo”, terms and code words that spies use.
Arts and Crafts
The book has information and instructions for writing in italics, making a quill pen, painting with watercolors (even doing it “on the go”), pressing flowers, making friendship bracelets, making a cloth-covered book, making your own paper, making paper airplanes, making cootie-catchers (origami fortune tellers), and making God’s-Eyes.
There are some projects that involve wood working, like making a peg game, a willow whistle, and a scooter.
Stunts and Random Skills
The book explains how to read palms (this could go with slumber party ideas, although they’re not grouped together in the book, because young girls often like to speculate about the future, especially their future love lives, or do spooky things to scare each other when they’re staying up late at night) and how to pull Three Silly Pranks of the kind that are common at summer camps (like short-sheeting a bed).
Dangerous Book for Girls Badges
This is the final part of the book. Since many of the activities in the book are the kind done at summer camps or in scout troops, the book offers suggested “badges” you can award yourself and your friends for doing the activities. Even though the activities in the book are not sorted into specific categories, there are six categories of badges offered: Sports and Games, Girl Lore, Adventure, World Knowledge, Life Skills, and Arts and Literature. The book doesn’t specify what activities you should master to award yourself these badges, leaving that up to the reader. My copy says that if you go to their website, you can print out these badges, but that website no longer exists. I don’t know if later printings say something different. Fortunately, a site reader found an online pdf of the badges that still works, so you can print off copies for yourself or for a group of kids. Thanks, Mike!
If you’re looking for something to do with the kids during coronavirus lock-downs (I first published this post in May 2020) and/or over summer vacation, this book has plenty of ideas, and you can even make up your own “badges”, using their ideas, my category suggestions, or anything else you would like to do yourself.
If you would like some suggestions to get you started or give you some goals to aim for, I think I would award badges like this (of course, these are just my suggestions):
Sports and Games – Learn the rules to at least two games and/or sports from the ones in the book. They can be any two games you like, indoor or outdoor or one of each. I don’t think winning at the games is necessary. It’s more important that kids know how to play games and how to teach other people to play so they can use the games with their friends.
Girl Lore – This is a good category for the sleepover-related activities. To earn this badge, someone could either try each of the sleepover games or activities or practice story-telling skills with a camp-out or sleepover type story or by telling a story about one of the famous women described in the book.
Adventure – This badge has a lot of possibilities, but I would suggest either using it for practicing outdoor or camping skills or for doing activities that are new and challenging. If you don’t want to go on a hiking, bird-watching, or camping trip, you can challenge yourself or your group to do three things you’ve never done before, in the spirit of adventure. They can be activities in this book (like the spy activities), suggestions from the section called The Daring Girls Guide to Danger (like watching a scary movie or riding a roller coaster or trying a new food), or going to a place you’ve never been before, etc.
World Knowledge – Study one of the sections in the book about countries of the world or historical events or people and tell someone else what you’ve learned.
Life Skills – Pick a skill to study and demonstrate to someone else, like knots and stitches or the clothing and hair tips, or assemble a first aid kit or tool kit and discuss the purpose of each of the items included. Alternatively, study and discuss the sections about job skills and how you can use them in your life.
Arts and Literature – Try at least one of the arts and crafts activities from the book and/or read at least one of the books from the list of Books That Will Change Your Life. Show off what you create and talk about the book you read.
As a bonus suggestion, if you’re doing these activities with a group or over an extended period of time, like the entire summer, you can award badges multiple times for different levels of achievement. Completing one of the activities related to a badge theme could be Level 1, and doing another would be Level 2, etc. That way, if someone doesn’t like a particular activity category, like the outdoor or camping activities, they can put their focus into achieving more in a category they like better. At the end of the summer, you could offer recognition to members of the group who achieved the highest levels for each category and/or people who found particularly creative ways to use their skills. You could even include an extra Overachiever award for people who tried everything!
The purpose of badges and awards like this is really to encourage kids to try new things, to set personal goals, and to persevere, so whatever you do with the badges should keep these purposes in mind. If you use the badges, keep the badges fun and celebratory of achievements or at least attempts at trying new things! As long as it’s fun, like a game, kids will want to continue.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. There is also a sequel to this book called The Double-Daring Book for Girls which contains similar types of activities and is also available through Internet Archive. There are no badges with the sequel book, but if you like that format for marking achievements, you can either reuse the badges from this book or make up some of your own.
The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn Iggulden and Hal Iggulden, 2006, 2007.
This is an activity/hobby book for children, especially for boys, but really, full of activities that girls could enjoy, too. It’s often sold in sets with a companion book, The Daring Book for Girls. These books follow in the tradition of earlier activity/hobby books like The American Boy’s Handy Book and The American Girl’s Handy Book by the Beard siblings. Some of the activities in these modern books are similar to ones included in historical children’s activity/hobby books, but there are some notable differences. Although The Dangerous Book for Boys includes sports and outdoor activities, it has more scientific and academic information than The American Boy’s Handy Book.
The differences between these books show changes that have taken place in society, the activities that adults want to promote for children, and the types of activities that children can actually use in the 125 years between the times when the two books were published. The motives of the authors of these books were similar, all of them wanting to produce the type of activity/hobby book that they would have liked to have when they were young and didn’t have, not because other hobby books didn’t exist exist when they were young but because they were looking for something that they hadn’t found in the hobby books of their youth. In the 1880s, Daniel Beard set out to write a hobby book for American boys because many of the hobby books of his youth were poorly written and/or came from England, using words that were not used in American English or recommendations for London shops where boys could buy equipment, which were of no use to an American boy. His book, The American Boy’s Handy Book, promoted do-it-yourself hobbies, particularly ones related to outdoor activities and suitable for children who lived near woods and lakes or rivers where they could do things like go fishing, sail boats that they made themselves, or build log cabin playhouses. However, 21st century society is much more urban/suburban, and it can be difficult or impossible for modern children to do something the things that Daniel Beard recommended. The Dangerous Book for Boys was written for 21st century children, who might need a bit of nudging to get off their computers and video game systems now and then and maybe a little academic help or something to ignite an interest in history or science, but are no less interested in learning something new and interesting or something fun to do with their friends. One thing that I hope readers come to understand from these books is that the world is full of things to do. There is more to do in life than anyone will have time to do in a single lifetime, and far, far more than can be contained in any one book. The Dangerous Book for Boys (published first in the UK and later in the US) contains things that 19th century Daniel Beard might have found very interesting but didn’t exist during his time, so they never even occurred to him as possibilities, and there are bound to be more things coming in the future that people either haven’t thought of yet or are quietly working on right now, planning the books and activities of the future. There’s always something to do. People just need time to do things and the willingness to get started.
I like to explain the contents of books so that people will know whether they would like to read them in more detail. It’s difficult to describe the contents of The Dangerous Book for Boys succinctly because the contents are extensive and they are not grouped into convenient categories. It’s more like reading a very long magazine with isolated articles, although some of the articles are related to each other. It’s just that related topics are not put next to each other. For example, the information about reading star maps comes much later in the book than the introduction to astronomy, and information about the solar system comes even later, with many other sections in between. There are also some sections of trivia/interesting information, history, or academic topics which were purposely split into different numbered sections and distributed throughout the book, like Questions About the World (explaining natural phenomena like the seasons, the tides, and why the sky is blue), Famous Battles (divided into sections starting with ancient battles and then more modern ones), Extraordinary Stories (about the lives and accomplishments of famous men, including the Wright Brothers and Robert the Bruce), and Understanding Grammar (a more academic section).
Because it would be difficult for me to explain everything in this book without basically copying the entire table of contents, which would take quite a lot of space to do, I’ll just hit some of the highlights by describing them in sections that the book doesn’t have but which explain the types of activities covered in this book. All of the types of activities that I describe below are included in the book, but there is also more in the book than I could take the time and space to describe in detail.
Useful Skills and Knowledge
The book has sections explaining how to do first aid, how to tie different types of knots, how to wrap a package with brown paper and string, and how to make cloth fireproof.
I was somewhat amused by the section about how to talk to girls. Most of it is good advice, like maintaining a clean appearance and not being vulgar or overdoing it with jokes. Lesson #1 is “It is important to listen.”, which is always true. The part that I thought was funny was in the introduction: “You may already have noticed that girls are quite different from you. By this, we do not mean the physical differences, more the fact that they remain unimpressed by your mastery of a game involving wizards, or your understanding of Morse Code.” To that, I say, “Are you kidding?!” I used to have Morse Code memorized from playing the Nancy Drew computer games by Her Interactive, and I know from my fascination with activity books like this that the reason why Morse Code looks the way it does is that Morse wisely decided to make the letters of the alphabet used the most often the shortest to form. I used to play World of Warcraft, and I played every one of the available factions, but then I got more interested in physical board games and board game history. My female friends continued much longer, although they ended up switching to Final Fantasy. I’ve played both D&D and Call of Cthulu and liked them both. The more wizards, the better, as far as I’m concerned!
I always think that advice about what girls like often fails to take into account that girls are individuals with different interests and hobbies, no matter what their age. Not all woman like to wear high heels (which are stupid, annoying shoes that are bad for your feet, especially those with the dumb, skinny heels that always make me turn my ankle), and some either never wear makeup or consider it an annoying hassle that they feel obligated to do to because other people expect it. Some girls wear their hair long because they like the feminine look or like to experiment with different types of artistic braids and hairstyles, and some girls chop their hair short because they’d rather just quickly run a comb through it and forget about it. Some women, like me and my friends are geeks, who love books, play video games and role-playing games, know various types of computer programming or maker hobbies, study history, and would gladly do most of the activities in books like this. Some girls are into sports and working out. There are even some girls who are into things like hunting and even taxidermy and wished that they could have joined the Boy Scouts instead of learning to sew and bake cupcakes in Brownies. People in general can have many and varied interests. Even though this book was written for boys of the 21st century, I don’t think that the authors are really in touch with women and girls of the 21st century and understand the range of topics that many of them find interesting. Although, I think that the authors’ attitudes about girls’ interests aren’t just due to them growing up in the 20th century themselves. Guys have often tried to figure out what women like and what women want, and they frequently get it wrong because they approach the question from the wrong angle. Chaucer tackled the problem of what women want way back in the Middle Ages, and he figured it out. What women like most is often what men like most: having things their own way. What that means varies from person to person because of our different interests, but in some form or other, that’s what we all want. So, don’t try to figure out what “girls” like; just ask a particular girl what she likes. Guys don’t need to try to please all the girls in the world at once, just the one they’re with. Most people will tell you who they are and what they’re interested in, given the chance (or maybe a Facebook or Instagram page), and when a boy finds a girl who likes things that he also likes or is willing to do things that he likes to do, he’s found a good one.
Aside from random, useful life skills, there is also academic information in the book that would be useful to school, like standard and metric measurements, the sections about how grammar works, the origins of words, Latin phrases, quotes from Shakespeare, the Ten Commandments, and poems that boys should know and books that boys should read.
Games
I count games differently from sports because sports tend to be outdoor activities and require a certain level of physical skill, and games tend to be more general, require less physical skill, and can be played indoors. This book includes some pen-and-paper games, marbles, chess, role-playing games, poker, and table football.
Sports
The book has the rules for soccer and stickball. It also discusses famous baseball players and rugby.
Outdoor Activities
These are activities to do that are related to the outdoors and nature and things to make related that are related to outdoor activities, including fishing, building a treehouse, making a bow and arrow, how to hunt and cook a rabbit, how to tan an animal skin, making a go-cart, and learning various methods of navigation and different types of trees.
Science and Technology
The book describes various topics related to science, like astronomy, insects and spiders, cloud formations, and fossils and dinosaurs. There are also instructions for making projects that would probably make good science fair projects, like a battery, an electromagnet, a periscope, a pinhole projector, and crystals.
History and Geography
There are sections about US geography (I don’t know if the original UK version had this or if it focused on the geography of the UK), Early American History, the Declaration of Independence, the Golden Age of Piracy, descriptions of the Seven Wonders of the World (both ancient and modern), the sections about Famous Battles from history, and a Brief History of Artillery.
Spies and Secret Codes
There are sections about the codes and ciphers that spies use, the Navajo Code Talkers’ Dictionary from World War II, the US Naval Flag Codes, and how to make secret inks.
Crafts
The book explains how to build a workbench, how to grind an italic nib for italic writing, and how to make marbled paper, making paper airplanes and paper hats, boats, and water bombs (these are little origami boxes that you fill with water and splat when you throw them at something – I’ve made them before).
Stunts and Random Skills
These are just random things that are fun to know how to do, like juggling, skipping stones, coin tricks. There is also a section about teaching tricks to dogs.
Dangerous Book for Boys Badges
This is the final part of the book. Since many of the activities in the book are the kind done at summer camps or in scout troops, the book overs suggested “badges” you can award yourself and your friends for doing the activities. Even though the activities in the book are not sorted into specific categories, there are six categories of badges offered: Carpentry and Woodworking, Direction and Navigation, Hunting and Fishing, Nature Exploring, Science and Experiments, and Astronomy and the Solar System. The book doesn’t specify what activities you should master to award yourself these badges, leaving that up to the reader. My copy says that if you go to their website, you can print out these badges, but that website no longer exists. I don’t know if later printings say something different.
If you’re looking for something to do with the kids during coronavirus lock-downs and/or over summer vacation, this book has plenty of ideas, and you can even make up your own “badges”, using their ideas, my category suggestions, or anything else you would like to do yourself.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. I’ve also learned that the book has inspired a tv series, which is available through Amazon Prime. You can see the trailer on YouTube.
The American Girl’s Handy Book by Lina Beard and Adelia B. Beard, 1887.
This is a Victorian activity book for girls, focusing particularly on outdoor seasonal activities and celebrations. Earlier, I covered The Girl’s Own Book, which is a similar type of Victorian activity book for girls, but there are important differences between the two. For one thing, they were published over 50 years apart, which means that the girls who read this book when it was new would likely be the granddaughters of girls who had grown up with The Girl’s Own Book. For another thing, this book is organized by the seasons and has a more outdoor focus. There is a reason for the somewhat different focus of this book, but I need to explain a little about the authors.
Lina Beard (“Lina” was short for Mary Caroline) and Adelia Beard were sisters. Their brother, Daniel Beard, was the author of The American Boy’s Handy Book, published a few years before The American Girl’s Handy Book. Like their brother did in his book, Lina and Adelia set out to make a book of activities specifically for an audience of American children, taking into account the sort of environment that the children would live in and the language they would use. In the preface to the book, they say that they had the idea to write a book of activities for girls after the publication of their brother’s book, thinking about times when they have heard girls wish for an activity book of their own whenever a new one for boys appeared. (There were previous activity/how-to books for girls, like The Girl’s Own Book, but their comments indicate that there were more books of this type for boys than for girls.)
Both Lina and Adelia would later be founding members of the Camp Fire Girls, the first major scouting organization for girls in America, during the 1910s, while Daniel Carter Beard was one of the founders of the Boy Scouts of America. (Camp Fire Girls was founded before the founding of the Girl Scouts. Today, it is now a co-ed scouting organization simply called Camp Fire.) Their family believed in appreciating nature and the benefits of exercise and outdoor life, and these concepts are reflected in the activities in of the Handy Books.
However, even though they valued exercise and healthy outdoor activities for girls and the subtitle specifically mentions “outdoor fun”, this book has plenty of indoor activities for girls as well. This is probably partly because they would have appealed to girls of the period and their parents, but it’s also because the book takes the realities of weather into account. An ideal time for forming walking clubs and enjoying the beauties of nature would have been in the spring, but not so much in the heat of summer, when making fans and playing relatively sedentary games would have helped keep them cool, and not in the winter, when things were covered in snow and girls would have to take their exercise indoors and work on indoor crafts and needlework. Overall, the The American Boy’s Handy Book has more outdoor activities than The American Girl’s Handy Book, but the Beard sisters also wrote other activity books, some of which have even more of an outdoor or camping focus.
Contents of the Book
The activities in this book are organized by season, and I liked the organization much better than the organization in The Girl’s Own Book. The organization by season is the same as in The American Boy’s Handy Book. Within each section, there are more specialized sections, focusing on particular pastimes and holidays in each season.
Spring
The holidays that appear in this section are April Fool’s Day, Easter, and May Day. May Day isn’t a major holiday in modern times, but schools in the 19th century commonly had May Day celebrations.
The recommended outdoor activities for spring are lawn tennis (this section includes instructions for making your own lawn tennis net), forming a walking club, and picking and preserving wildflowers. The wildflowers section is the longest section in this part of the book, and it has a surprising array of methods for preserving wildflowers, including crystallizing them.
Summer
The holidays in this section are Midsummer Eve and the Fourth of July. Midsummer Eve isn’t a common holiday for modern girls to celebrate, but the Midsummer activities of the 19th century involve fortune telling.
Summer provides many opportunities for outdoor activities. There are tips for holding various types of picnics and decorating a seaside cottage, and there are suggestions for using plants in art and making dolls out of corn husks and flowers. However, summer is also very hot, and in the days before air conditioning, people would have also wanted ways to relax and keep themselves as cool as possible in the heat. The summer section of the book has instructions for making fans and hammocks and playing relatively quiet games.
Autumn
This section begins with suggestions for celebrating Halloween and ends with Thanksgiving. The Victorian era was the beginning of Halloween parties as we know them today. There would have been games for children and romantic divination games for young adults, particularly young women and girls.
The Thanksgiving section offers tips for putting on a kind of Thanksgiving play, but it’s not historically accurate by any means, and the American Indians aren’t portrayed well. The whole thing is more like a series of joke skits.
The nature themes in the Autumn section focus on nutting parties and making decorations from autumn foliage. A nutting party is a sort of walking party and picnic, where the girls enjoy the beauties of nature, gather chestnuts, and roast and eat the nuts afterward.
Most of the autumn activities focus on various types of art, including drawing, painting in oil and water colors, making picture frames, making clay and wax models, making plaster casts, and painting china.
I was fascinated by the arts and crafts information because I always enjoyed arts and crafts, but I’d like to draw your attention to one activity that doesn’t quite fit with the others in this section: making a tin-can telephone. This fascinates me because telephones were a relatively new invention at the time this book was written, but the tin can variety apparently weren’t far behind.
Winter
This section begins with Christmas activities and games and tips for making homemade presents. The other holiday celebrations included are New Year’s Eve, a special Leap Day party (for years with Leap Days), and Valentine’s Day.
Most of the activities in this section are indoor activities, like studying heraldry and making your own coat of arms with suggested symbols, doing needlework, making book covers and scrap books, and making things from stuff that otherwise would be thrown away. (They didn’t have the term upcycling back then, but that’s basically what this activity was about.) There are a couple of sections about decorating a room, decorating windows and mantle pieces and making and decorating furniture.
There is also a section with recipes for different types of candy.
For exercise, there is a section about doing indoor exercises. There is also a section about creating booths for a fair, which surprised me because I wouldn’t have thought of that as a winter activity. Then again, people can begin planning early for later events.
Jestress's Forgotten Books and Stories 