Book Review: 50 Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do) by Gever Tulley and Julie Speigler

This is the perfect book for additional Summer activities for "bored" kids!  By working your way through the book, you can give your kids something to look forward to, and provide some great quality family time along the way!

Synopsis: Gever Tulley offers a radical concept for parents: Teach your children about safety by exposing them to risk.  He believes that experimenting with “dangerous” things helps foster creativity and teaches problem solving by exposing children to explore the world around them with old-fashioned, hands-on learning. 

The book offers the suggestion that parents can think outside the box by letting their kids do the same.  Letting children explore, tinker, and learn-by-doing boosts creativity and teaches them troubleshooting that will help later in life.

Some of the activities included in the book:

#01 - Lick a 9-volt Battery

#06 - Drive a Nail

#10 - Play with the Vacuum Cleaner

#24 - Construct Your Own Flying Machine

#38 - Learn Tightrope Walking

#46 - Superglue Your Fingers Together 


Check out the Video for #1, then try it with YOUR kids!:








Review: In looking through the book I realized we had done about 10 of them already with Kiddo! I never thought that those things (sticking hand out window of moving car, kissing like the French), could be considered 'dangerous'! Other ones like standing on a roof, making a bomb in a bag or walking home from school, obviously meet that criteria! 


The layout of the book is great and lends itself to 'scientific study'- There are the diagram and instructions for each activity, as well as warnings (such as makes a mess, can cause cuts and scrapes, involves projectiles), required items, length of time for activity, difficulty level, tips and supplemental data and on the opposite page a blank grid page for making notes or your own diagrams! This is a great activity book and perfect for some kid and dad bonding!

About the Authors: Gever Tulley was fortunate to grow up in a world full of possibilities and adventures. He and his big brother were free to explore their environment and invent their own projects while growing up in the wide-open rural environs of Northern California and interior British Columbia. Their curiosity was encouraged by their parents, who instilled early on a sensible approach to their experiments. Gever's famous rule while babysitting: "If you're going to play with fire, be sure to do it outside." (Note that this was in the ever-wet yards of coastal Northern California, not the tinder-dry inland desert!) In 2005, Gever founded Tinkering School to teach kids how to build things. He created the school since he believes we all learn by fooling around. Grand schemes, wild ideas, crazy notions, and intuitive leaps of imagination are, of course, encouraged and fertilized. After years of creating playful hands-on projects for kids of all ages, Gever wanted to share with a wider audience the discovery that comes from this directed "fooling around." Fifty Dangerous Things (you should let your children do) is his first book on the subject.

Julie Spiegler is a project manager and editor who has collaborated with Tulley on virtually all of his projects.

Disclosure / Disclaimer: I received this book for review purposes on this blog, free of harge, from Penguin Publishing Company .No other compensation, monetary or in kind, has been received or implied for this post. Nor was I told how to post about it.