Let's Color! (Kumon First Step Workbooks)

I recently discovered the Kumon books and I am super pleased with them.I will be reviewing all those I have so it will help other parents get a better idea of what's inside. The LET'S COLOR book is very nice and is part of the Kumon First Steps series for ages 2 and up. I must say that this book isn't for the very young only. My son is 8, and is a very normal child in every way, yet like some children, has not been very quick to develop fine motor skills for writing, holding a pencil, cutting, etc. He has enjoyed all his Kumon books very much, and they are not babyish. LET'S COLOR is a very nice book for children who would be overwhelmed by a whole uncolored page being placed in front of them to "finish". I like that most of each page in LET'S COLOR is colored already and is very colorful; only a white circle, square, triangle (nice for teaching shapes along the way) is left blank for the child to color in. My son is very pleased with just a small bit of coloring to finish the picture. He especially loves when his colored pencil ( I recommend Prismacolors over crayons) matches almost exactly with the color of the object and when finished, you can't easily see where he did the coloring. Later pages have you color 2 or 3 parts of the picture, such as blue, green, and yellow circles on the beach ball, or 3 different colored balloons, or the yolk of the egg. Then the last few pages are having the child color the 2 flowers, the mane of the lion, the icing and candles on a birthday cake, or different parts of a clown. Even these pages with more white areas to color, are not overwhelming to a child, as the full picture is only about 8 inches square. My son enjoyed the first "scribble" pages, where you drew hair on a boy, spaghetti on a plate, sprinkles on the ice cream, water squrting out of the garden hose onto the children, etc. He has enjoyed coloring in this book as we have our read aloud time in the evening. Kumon uses high quality heavy paper, and the coloring pages are printed on one side only. I highly recommend it to any parent of young children, and would make a nice little gift with a new box of colored pencils or crayons. These are attractive when finished to give to grandma and grandpa to hang on their refrigerator. I really think you and your child will have fun with this book.

My daughter had a great time completing this work book. Very fun and the pages were of great quality. It would be best as a spiral notebook because it just doesn’t stay opened. However, don’t let that steer you away can easily cut the pages. I recommend and will purchase products from this brand again.

Started my daughter on this just a week or so after turning 2. She had used a crayon before but only briefly and could only draw marks across the page in no deliberate or concentrated fashion. Dramatic improvement in her dexterity doing 1-4 of these a day over a period of around 3 weeks, as shown by photos. Do read the instructions provided for this very carefully, as this is not an ordinary coloring book, and is designed to follow an orderly progression of difficulty and components.I would suggest being very directly involved for the 3-10 minutes a day this might occupy and always stop when your child still seems interested. Hold on to the crayon box and give one crayon at a time after you both agree on the crayon to use. Keep the child on the correct page, introduce them to the object and direct them to what needs to be colored. Praise heavily, and encourage intentional drawing. If they want to color on their own, allow them to use the back or other paper, but keep the kumon exercises themselves a separate endeavor. Put the workbook out of reach when you're not ready to supervise.Book is very well designed as far as paper, artwork and the kinds of tasks. I'll say that the last few items (~34-39) seem to dramatically ramp up in difficulty, in terms of the size, shape and number of things to be colored per page to the point I don't think my daughter was quite able to follow as much as the others, but overall it was a good experience.Important is to recognize how this fits into the overall Kumon workbook progression. This goes onto "MORE Let's Color", and from there dexterity should be good enough for "tracing" (connect the dots) which can then progress to "easy mazes" (curved lines) and other maze books, after which the child's skill should be good enough to begin writing letters and numbers. As there are many workbooks for letters and numbers it's nice to see a book that works even before a child can draw a straight or curved line with any reliability. Age-wise 2.0 was just fine to start. I could see 18-20 month year olds potentially having a good time with this, but the child probably needs to be able to respond to suggestions, pointing and probably naming colors to get the full effect of the workbook. But overall it's the best "starting from zero" workbook I could imagine.