Customer Reviews

What Can You Do with a Paper Bag?

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book, published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, is a TERRIFIC book if you are interested in childrens' crafts and art. The book provides very detailed and easy-to-follow instructions on hat and mask making using your average grocery store variety paper bag (and a few other on-hand items). The hats and masks are all inspired by works of art found in the museum. Our elementary school are using these activities at our Spring Arts Festival. The results are dynamic and the costs for matierials is little to nothing.

This is the best book for a rainy afternoon and a bored child (children)!"What Can You Do With A Paper Bag" written by Judith Cressy and published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, has 21 paper bag projects geared to fascinate your child and encourage creativity and imagination.

Step-by-step instructions, very easy to follow, illustrate how to make Mayan masks, a Pharoah's headdress, crowns, a Fang (African) mask, a "Perseus Winged Helmut," George Washington's hair, and many other clever ideas. All you need are paper bags, (grocery store brown bags are good), scissors, glue, tape, crayons or paints, and an eager child. The humblest of supplies can provide hours of fun.

**A side note - The book was inspired by works of art from The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It can also be used as a teaching tool for showing children the art of different cultures at different periods in time.

Excellent and highly recommended!
JANA

Great book. It is sometimes hard to find books that relate to art and history. I love this book in the class and at home with my own children.

Unfortunately, I have to disagree with the 5-star ratings this book received previously. My 6-year old son will do anything arts & crafts related, and he showed no interest at all in this book. The only benefit from this book is that it got him thinking about what else he could create using his own imagination and a paper bag. As a side note, 12 of the 21 hats were for girls which left only 9 to choose from for my son.

I saw this book at the Museum of Contemporar Art in Los Angeles several years ago and my nephew is just old enough to appreciate the book so I bought it for him for Christmas. It's out of print so you have to get it used at this point, but it is a treasure. The book contains dozens of different masks/headpeices you can make that are based on works of art from different time periods and cultures. The projects are of varying difficulty levels, but what I was not expecting, is that only a few of the projects use a standard size grocery bag, most of the projects use smaller paper bags so we've had to take to saving take-out paper bags of varying sizes so we'll always have on hand the right sized bag. So far we've made two masks/ headpeices, and they're awesome. My nephew is 5 and every time I see him he wants to make a mask with me. I have to do most of the work, because it's a lot of cutting, measuring, etc, but he helps paint, pick out colors, etc. If you have a child who is 8 or older, they could do these unsupervised. I really enjoy crafts so it's a nice activity for us to share.

This is a book for very young children. It doesn't work for me, but I can use it as a gift. Young children will love it. The activities in it are much more healthy than electronic games for kids. The price was right also! The book was in good condition and it arrived here in good time. Thanks