As parents, we love buying our kids books, or borrowing them from the library, because we think they are educational.
But what if a book could also be inspirational, help engage them in subjects they find difficult and allow them to have fun too? Help is at hand, as all these books fit this brief and will help your child enjoy the activities while their brains soak up all that useful information.
Activity books come in a whole range of styles and types, from colouring books that can help with concentration and calm anxiety, to full-on interactive science books that help create the next Einstein.
Aim to buy your child books that you know they will like and enjoy, based on what they have chosen in the past but then select a few that are slightly outside their area of interest or just above the suggested age range, so as to offer additional stimulus. You may find that they show a surprising interest in a subject that they have not come across before, such as astronomy, experimental science, maths or art.
Activity books can help you drag your child away from the TV or computer and they can learn a whole load of extra skills, including patience, motor skills and creativity. They can also help them practice expanding their attention span and learning new facts, too.
What to look for
- Age appropriate: Characters and language that are appropriate for your child’s age and level of understanding
- Visual cues: Great illustrations and diagrams that help explain the topic
- Learning aids: how to find further information, more books in the series etc
- Interaction: does the book have activities the child can easily take part in?
- Cost: can you use the book itself for the projects or will you need to buy lots of expensive materials?
Best activity books at a glance:
- Best outdoor activity book: 101 Things for Kids to Do Outside - £14.42, Amazon
- Best science activity book: Usborne 365 Science Activities - £12.99, Waterstones
- Best cooking activity book: The Kew Gardens Children’s Cookbook - £12.99, Waterstones
- Best maths activity book: Maths Activity Book: STEM Starters for Kids - £16.93, Amazon
- Best sticker activity book: Science Museum Sticker Activity Book - £4.99, Waterstones
- Best language activity book: Oxford Reading Tree Grammar and Punctuation - £10.01, Amazon
- Best craft activity book: Pom Pom Puppies - £26.81, Amazon
- Best holiday activity book: Usborne Holiday Activity Book - £3.37, Amazon
- Best coding activity book: Computer Coding Projects For Kids - £13.19, Amazon
- Best colouring activity book: Wonderous Animals From Around The World - £10.90, Amazon
See our selection of the best below
101 Things for Kids to Do Outside
Best: outdoor activity book
Age: 6-9 year-olds
This book is ideal to get the computer game-loving kids off the couch and outside to enjoy outdoor play.
More and more, we recognise the benefits of getting outside into the fresh air and realise nature can have massive benefits for us all - and certainly for our children. Playing outside not only allows kids to interact with friends but also helps them learn lots of skills. There are additional benefits such as some much-needed physical activity, they will learn about the natural world – and they’ll sleep better, too.
Inside the book are instructions for lots of different activities, such as learning to recognise animal tracks, making rubbings from natural surfaces, creating a bird’s nest and making a potion laboratory. Other activities are more physical, such as creating your own Olympic games and crawl tunnel, while others engage their creative brains such as making their own kite, sundial and rain gauge.
The language is ideal for 6- to 9-year-olds and the illustrations are inviting and explanatory. Short of time? No problems, as there are some 10-minute activities while others can be engaged in for hours of fun.
Buy now £14.42, Amazon
Usborne 365 Science Activities
Best: science activity book
Age: 6+
If you’re the kind of parent who likes to do something fun with your child each day as an antidote to schoolwork, this could just be the book for you - it has something to do for every single day of the year.
Packed full of simple and engaging experiments, your children can learn fun facts such as; why is bread full of holes? What does DNA actually look like? How are rainbows created?
Little ones can discover the answers to these problems themselves by using simple experiments. Tasks for them to get their teeth into include making bird and insect food, watching the cells of carrots grow and shrink using salty water and much, much more.
Buy now £12.99, Waterstones
The Kew Gardens Children’s Cookbook: Plant, Cook, Eat
Best: cooking activity book
Age: 9+
Help your child learn the cycle of our food, from seed to garden to plate with this beautifully illustrated book. Created in association with the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, it has guides to growing vegetables like potatoes, carrots, peas and beans in your garden – even in just a window box if you don’t have outside space – and then shows you how to turn them into tasty dishes.
Its step-by-step recipes help you not only make delicious meals and desserts but also help your kids learn about how plants grow, from their earliest days as a seed to keeping them watered, removing weeds, learning about garden creatures, picking your home-grown produce and even composting the trimmings.
It can help encourage healthy eating, as your child won’t be able to wait to transform their first veg into tasty meals.
Buy now £12.99, Waterstones
Maths Activity Book - STEM Starters for Kids
Best: maths activity book
Age: 5-8
If you think your little one is showing signs of becoming pretty good at maths, you’ll understand that knowing their numbers and how they work is a pretty good introduction to all the other sciences, technology and engineering.
Making maths interesting, rather than boring, will pay massive dividends and they won’t dread maths classes if they already have a more holistic view of how mathematics works in our everyday lives – something that’s often missing from standard school classes.
Your little mathematician can learn and explore at home by working through the activities on each page, beautifully illustrated and with clear and easy-to-understand explanations. This could be the genesis for a life of STEM subjects and lead to a career in science.
Buy now £16.93, Amazon
Science Museum Sticker Activity Book
Best: sticker activity book
Age: 6+
Designed for the Science Museum, this sticker activity book packs a lot inside its pages including science puzzles, details of exhibits from the museum and games and facts kids can learn about while putting the stickers in their correct places.
The topics covered are quite varied, from space, cars, planes, ships and trains, to medicine, energy and materials. Astronomy is. Covered with a constellation dot-to-dot, learn about the weather by doing a crossword, take a quiz about materials and discover which bones come from which parts of the human body.
There’s a double page of stickers so it will be an activity your child can do over several hours and it helps kids learn all about science in a new, engaging and interactive way.
Buy now £4.99, Waterstones
Oxford Reading Tree Grammar and Punctuation
Best: language activity book
Age: 6-7
When you read a book with your child, it’s good if you know that it will help support the work they are doing at school, and this language book is in line with the National Curriculum. It complements the Read with Biff, Chip & Kipper My Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling Kit book.
This book features 55 wipe-clean cards with a special pen and your child can follow the characters Biff, Chip and Kipper Grammar as they develop punctuation and grammar skills and learn to write, all through the medium of fun games.
They can learn to recognise word classes (nouns, verbs etc), find out how to create a sentence structure and practise their writing skills. There are useful tips for the parents on using the flashcards and it provides support for parents via www.oxfordowl.co.uk.
Buy now £10.01, Amazon
Pom Pom Puppies
Best: craft activity book
Age: 8+
Rainy day getting you down? Turn to crafting to make sure your kids have an enjoyable activity to do and something to show at the end of it. This book shows you how to turn a ball of wool into an adorable little pooch with personality.
First, your little one can wind the wool, snip and trim it to puppy shape, then groom it with the included real grooming comb, little hair bows, travel bags, dog collars and other accessories. You can even make different dog breeds from chihuahua to Pomeranian but their imagination can create any they like.
Once you’ve got the hang of the basic way to make a puppy, your child can experiment with different colour ears, tails or trims. The book comes with instructions, four colours of wool pom-pom makers, eyes, comb, glue, foam accessories, felt, ribbon, paper accessories, tiaras, tags, and more.
Buy now £26.81, Amazon
Usborne Holiday Activity Book
Best: holiday activity book
Age: 5-8
Keeping your kids entertained through the long summer holidays is always a bit of a chore. Why not use this book, firstly to keep them engaged while they read and explore it, then as inspiration as you get out and about, enjoying some of the activities it suggests?
The book explores a trip to the beach, to tropical islands and snowy mountains, explains how bustling cities work and more. Your children are asked to spot different items as they go, such as creatures that live in the rainforest, then they can complete a large dot-to-dot project inside an aquarium, they can explore a shipwreck maze and find a way out of it and colour in a carnival scene too.
It has an amazing 96 pages of puzzles, games, stickers, drawings and recipes. That summer holiday will just fly by.
Buy now £3.37, Amazon
Computer Coding Projects for Kids BY Carol Vorderman
Best: coding activity book
Age: 9+
We all need computers in our everyday lives but inspire your children to find out how they actually work by getting them into coding.
This book by maths genius and former Countdown expert Carol Vorderman teaches your little one how to write Python code and learn computer programming.
Python helps your kids create computer projects such as inventing whacky games and tricky quizzes for their friends and family to solve.
All you need is your own computer and an internet connection and who knows, you may inspire your child to follow a career in computer science.
Buy now £13.19, Waterstones
Wonderous Animals from Around the World
Best: colouring activity book
Age: 2+
Perfect for popping into a small bag with some pencils and taking out with you for deployment whenever boredom strikes, this is from a range of lovely monochrome books that can be coloured by your kids with any colours they like – so there’s no limit for their creativity.
Featuring 23 animals from all around the world, this is great for kids who enjoy the natural world and love to learn the names of animals, sea creatures and birds. It has plenty of really obvious and easily recognised animals like kangaroos, snakes and hedgehogs but also introduces you and your child to the lesser known creatures of the world such as pangolins and the cassowary.
Colouring is credited to be a great activity for mindfulness, so if you have a child who can get a little anxious, this will be perfect for them. The book is also great for eco-warriors, as it’s plastic-free, uses FSC-certified recycled paper and donates to wildlife charities too.
Buy now £10.90, Amazon
