Creative Activities...Program Series: Book #3 Discovering

The Series

Last fall, my husband and I popped into a secondhand store (urgently titled OMG THRIFT). I wanted to find some interesting little-known games so I could do a review for my-frien’-Jen’s board-game blog, Idle Remorse. In addition to two games, I came across an incomplete set of vintage books called Creative Activities …Program. (The ellipses make me go “dot dot dot” myself—why are they there? I sense reluctance or confusion.)

I love creativity, I love art projects, and I love hardcover kids’ books. (They usually have some amazing illustrations or can be re-purposed in a fun way). Thus, this was a real treat to find—especially when so many of the art projects turned out to be absolutely Bonkers City.

Each book in the 1974 Creative Activities …Program series is a different color. However, all share the same acid-trip-tacular cover featuring a blazing sun, a pouty-lipped lion, a daisy, and what can only be an Easter chick in drag with a turnip leaf growing out of its head. Truly, I don’t know what this thing is.

The books are titled by the type of activity they’re focused on, such as

Making
Playing
Discovering*
Performing*
Creating*
Collecting
Communicating*
Producing*
Fooling*
Organizing*
Growing*
Caring
Building
Searching
Foraging
Traveling
Exploring
Sewing
Cooking
Finding

I put a helpful asterisk next to the ones I have on hand. Consider all the others wish list items next time my birthday rolls around!

I’m going to use my skills of reason and deduction to assume, by careful analysis of the volumes I have upon my person, that this entire collection is full of nuttery. Let me show you, starting in the perfect place to start: book three! Yes, this is the book report no one asked for.

#3 Discovering

The full title of Discovering is actually Discovering Me and the Rest of the Universe, which sounds like a guide to burgeoning adolescence and space travel. (Someone write that, now.) Projects are divided into the following sections:

Me
Home
Yard
Community
Earth
Weather
Sky

Let’s begin with the center of the universe: Me!

Me

In this section, you do things that concern the five senses we all learned about as soon as we shot out of the womb. Specifically, you’ll

Blindfold your friend and make him smell pear and apple slices
Blindfold more friends and take turns pretending pieces of boiled eggs are human cheeks

Would you know what was going on in this image with no context?

Stare at your index finger and take turns closing your left and right eye
Tie a strand of your hair to a quarter and hang it in a jar
“Map your head” (or rather, draw pictures of the stuff you think about)

Are you feeling more creative yet? Are you feeling properly discovered?

Home

Let’s see what activities the Home section has in store for us.

Conduct some “pepper magic” by making ground pepper “jump” onto a comb (It isn’t clear why you’re doing this.)
Extinguish a candle using a homemade fire extinguisher (You’re encouraged to play with fire and there’s no adult-supervision-required blurb!)

This guy got the job of fire chief by doing WHAT…?

Perform some “trashcan archaeology”

Most of the projects were barely about the home! Who edited this?

Yard

Will the Yard projects make more sense than those in previous sections? I should say not!

Play hide-and-seek with stuffed animals
Hunt earthworms at night and feed them coffee grounds and lettuce
Make rubber bands out of milkweed goo
Shake a tree and see what kind of crap falls out of it
Dump flour on a spiderweb

What in the world, you guys.

Community

The universe of projects has expanded to include your whole community now. The projects are as follows:

Create a telephone poster (Think of it as a greatest hits of your phone book.)
“Make a rubbing of a friend’s ear”

Secret Rubbings: A Collection of Erotic Embossings

Go on a “blindfold tour” of your yard (Use all your other senses as your stumble sightlessly across your lawn.)
Conduct a dog census that ends in a dog parade

THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PROJECT IN THE BOOK

Earth

Let’s explore the Earth now by doing the following:

Build a water clock to “time a turtle race”

You can also use it when you watch paint dry!

Play the “spool game” with a marshmallow (I don’t quite know how to explain what’s going on here.)
Balance a potato on your sleeping grandpa’s head

Turn salt water fresh (This could be useful but it’s hidden among activities like “knock the marshmallow off a pencil tip.”)

Weather

Now in Discovering, you’ll dabble in meteorology with projects such as

Build a weather vane
Make a wind anemometer (with no explanation of what it is)
Create a rain gauge
Make a barometer to predict the weather
Set up your own weather station using your homemade weather vane, anemometer, rain gauge, and barometer!

These activities may actually be of use in life thus they are no fun.

Sky

In this final section, you’ll learn how to do the following:

Build a paper airplane (er, “sky flyer”)
Make a satellite model without understanding the purpose
Punch constellation patterns in oatmeal boxes
Glue glow-in-the-dark stars in the shape of Cassiopeia and the Big Dipper to the underside of an umbrella

Do you feel like you did an adequate amount of discovering with those projects? Admittedly, some good ideas are cloaked amid an overall mess of stuff to do. Maybe it’d be helpful to first understand who these books are for and why…? That’s the question I have for all the books, really, which will be reviewed in the future!

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