The Amazing Spider-Man : Spider Sense, How To Draw Color and Activity Book
This activity book is a slim volume that would make a great treat for rainy days. It's designed for ages 8 and up, but the difficulty of the activities varies widely. My five year old was able to do a few of them, while others are quite challenging for my eight year old.
The front of the book has the easiest activities. These include a very simple alphabet code, a hidden items page, a find the differences activity, a number dot-to-dot, and a maze.
The more challenging activities include a word find, a logic puzzle, and three codes to figure out. With one code the message is broken up into tiles with three characters, including letters, punctuation, and spaces. My eight year old and I made a duplicate set of tiles from construction paper so that we wouldn't have to cut up the book. Another code involves following a path of even numbers, then a path of odd numbers. This is good math review. The last code is the most challenging. First you have to change each letter in the code words to the letter before it in the alphabet. Next you change all the X's to N's, then you reverse the letters in each word.
There are also two drawing pages. The first shows a web swinging spider-man in the center of the page. You need to draw the city around him. The second shows Doc Ock, and it's your job to entrap him in a web of your own creation.
Did I say draw? That's the best part of the whole activity book. It comes with an exceptionally cool silver gel pen which looks cool on the red pages. And the kids can use the pen long after they finish all the activities.
My kids were instantly drawn to this book. I was pleased to find that many of the activities required thinking skills or review of basic math and language skills. I was lucky that they agreed to "share" the book with the younger one doing the easy activities and the older one doing the harder ones.
I thought it was a bit slim for the price, but if you need something to keep a young Spider-man fan's mind and hands busy, this activity book is worth the cost. And don't forget, the pen is really cool. Plus there is a postcard to cut from the backpage and send to a friend.
