P.S.-We Made This!, unexpected crafting that lives up to its title

The issue with most craft books that we’ve run across is that they’re too complex. The end creation looks great, but it requires too many things to make it and has far too many steps. It’s worth noting that I’m a relatively handy guy also. I have a garage full of stuff to fix most simple things in a house and have two boys over ten, so we’ve acquired lots of craft things too. Having said that, every craft or maker book that we’ve tried to do has fallen short. P.S.-We Made This! does not the aforementioned issues. Instead, it’s a book of 85 relatively simple crafts or projects that mid-through upper elementary students can do with minimal to no assistance.

I’m a dad who wants their kids to be crafty and I can hear the eye-rolls from here when I described P.S.-We Made This!. Sure, they can make the projects themselves, but they’ll require trips to the craft store to get some wooden thing that I’ll never use again. I need to purchase some metal ring attachment hooks in order to make it work. Believe me, I am used to crafting books requiring that thing that’s needed in order for the craft or activity to actually be completed.

Erica Domesek, the author of P.S-I Made This! heard you also and has created a book that’s simple enough to craft, yet old enough not to be baby. The overwhelming majority of the crafts have two or three steps that are simple to follow. Here’s an example: use toilet paper rolls and paper towel rolls cut into segments to create skeleton joints, fingers, and toes. That’s the second of three steps in the craft that’s on page 54 called Self-Portrait X-Ray. The craft is complimented with an illustration of all of the ingredients that you’ll need, how the individual pieces look once they’re ready and a full-page illustration of how the finished craft looks.

You educators and parents know that crafts will engage those young ages in ways that they may not acknowledge. They’ll build cognitive, physical, or social-emotional skills, any of which will help build and stretch those growing brains. The book lists each craft and has icons at the top of each new activity’s page. It’s not that kids will seek out and do only those crafts relative to identity or spatial recognition, but somewhere, in that deep, dark, corner of their mind that won’t acknowledge, they know that crafts work on multiple levels.

The activities in P.S.- We Made This! can be done by upper elementary school kids individually. However, those middle elementary school kids will love the fact that they are able to do these crafts, with minor supervision, and then proudly (and realistically) say, I made this! Some of the crafts might need a hot glue gun or to have something cut with a box cutter or a pair of scissors, but that’s the extent of their complication.

The biggest cause for parental craft celebration is that you have all of the ingredients needed to do all of the crafts. It’s possible that you don’t have a hot glue gun, but that’s it, and having owned one for several years I can testify to the fact that we used it at least once a month. If you don’t have one it’s something that you’ll find yourself using over and over, wondering how you lived without one for so long, so go ahead and buy one.

The book excels in encouraging readers to use what they’ve got in order to complete the crafts. It’s also realistic in its expectations because it realizes that most families won’t have the tools or minutia that some books expect them to have. Instead, it’s just a variety of cute crafts that invite families to do them together, classes to build them for tactile time or solo time for those slightly older crafters.

P.S.-We Made This!, Super Fun Crafts That Grow Smarter + Happier Kids! is by Erica Domesk with illustrations by Steph Stilwell, and is available on Abrams Books.

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