We did this for years. I am really surprised my parents never bought us a copy, but to their credit, they remembered this and bought my daughter a copy when she was about 5 years old.
Ed Emberley teaches that if you can draw a few basic shapes (circle, square, triangle, lines, dots, and a few numbers and letters), you can draw anything that you can imagine. From building a heart shape from two circles and a triangle to more complicated things like castles, dragons, and even the Canadian flag, Ed shows how easy it really is.
But it's not "just a drawing book"...it's a whole lot more. It's a child's first technical how-to manual. It sets them on the right path for acquiring the skills needed to self-educate.
Image by Austin Kleon via Flickr
It's really good for teaching kids how to follow step-by-step instructions, especially ones that contain no text...a skill that will come in handy later in life if they have to build IKEA furniture.
It also teaches a valuable life skill by changing how you look at the world. It teaches that anything in life that seems too complicated and hard to do, is made much easier when you analyze it and break it down into much simpler parts. The earlier in life a child learns this, the more doors will be open to them, and the list of possibilities greatly increased.
It's not enough to tell a child that they can accomplish anything in life that they set their mind to. They need to be taught how, and this book is a great place to start.
Purchasing this book through my Amazon affiliate link will not increase your price and is a great way to show your appreciation to me for introducing you to this book.
Budding young web designers and developers usually learn this pretty quick, when creating a page on Windows and not using the same case as the files and folders they are linking to. They often will use lowercase in all the URLs, regardless of the case of the actual file and folder names. And this will work fine when viewed on their Windows machine. But as soon as they upload it to a server that is running something else, like Linux, it stops working. Their page is full of broken images and dead links, because they used something like mypicture.jpg in place of the actual file name of MyPicture.jpg and about.html in place of the actual file name of About.html.
If the server is running Windows, case doesn't matter. The reason for this is because you can only have a single file or folder of a particular name in a folder, regardless of the case used in that file or folder name.
If the server is running Linux, case matters, as you can have multiple files and folders of the same name within a folder, each having a different case.
