When the package with My First Creativity Book: Pirates arrived in the mail, it only took my five-year-old a couple of minutes to tear into the package and to begin to go through the pages of the workbook. It was so exciting for him, the a child who my other children often label as “too little” for his own schoolwork, to have something that he could play and do on his own.

The My First Creativity series, published by Barron’s Educational Services, Inc., is a series of activities books that are aimed to provide plenty of fun and independent work for children in the approximate age ranges of four to seven years old. Each workbook is approximately 60 pages, with over 200 stickers, sticker activities, connect-the dots, mazes, counting exercises, matching games, coloring activities, and cut-out activities for your child to complete. There are even foldout sticker pages, made to be able to reuse for creating sticker scenes for decoration and pretend play. These workbooks are full-color and their suggested retail price is $9.99.

When we received our workbook, the first thing my five year old and I did was to sit together on our couch and go over the directions in the workbook pages as he planned which pages he wanted to complete first out of the workbook. He spent almost a week of his spare time completing pages in the workbook. He would do dot-to-dots, color, place stickers and complete counting activities completely independently. With only a little help from me, he used the included pages to create his own pirate hat and eye patch. Once we had created that, my son spent many hours in pirate pretend play. He even took construction paper we had on hand and drew several versions of pirate maps as part of his pretend play.

This is one of the more fun things that we have used in our house. In fact, after just a day or two with it, I ended up ordering the Princess version of this book for my four year old. While she needed more help from me to complete the activities, she also had a great deal of fun with her workbook, making these books a hit at our house.

As a homeschooling parent, I do wish that this had more early literacy activities. It seems that the vast majority of the exercises are either math based, or so early on the literacy timetable that a few phonics or letter recognition activities would have been a greatly appreciated addition to these books. Having said that, this book and the others I have ordered since have been great fun at our house, and I’ll be continuing to buy them for us to have fun and learn with.

-Product review by Rebecca Ray, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, LLC, April, 2016