Craft projects can liven up rainy spring afternoons

NEW YORK -- If you've heard your children say "there's nothing to do" one too many times, it might be time to stockpile some indoor activities.

Several new craft activity books offer ideas to save for a rainy day, if spring showers keep you indoors or if winter keeps its grip on your area long past February.

For the youngest children, several books offer activities that are simple but allow children to unleash their creativity.

Holidays provide the framework for "Crafts for Kids" (Hamlyn, ages 2-6) by Gill Dickinson. With color photos and instructions, the book outlines craft activities for Easter, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween, Mother's Day, Father's Day and Valentine's Day.

Inexpensive, fun activities for birthday parties are offered as well, such as stringing foam flowers onto necklaces; personalizing paper crowns with patterned paper, buttons, glitter or feathers; and making "birthday bandanas" with napkins and markers.

"My Picture Art Class" (DK Publishing, ages 3-5) by Nellie Shepherd takes painting and drawing and adds a dimension, encouraging children to turn their pictures into 3-D objects like hats and rockets. Shepherd's projects raid the pantry quite a bit to create texture, using uncooked rice, aluminum foil and food coloring along with paper, paint, felt and glitter.

Another book by Shepherd, "My Puppet Art Class" (DK Publishing, ages 3-5), uses art projects to inspire children to write and perform once they've made their puppets. Once they've made Serena Swan, Bao Bao the Dragon and Sidney Snake, it's up to the children what the characters will do when they use them in a puppet show.

For elementary school-age children, the preparation is more elaborate and the activities often illustrate lessons the children are learning in school.

Even blowing bubbles can be educational, as in "The Ultimate Bubble Book: Soapy Science Fun" (Sterling, ages 7-11) by Shar Levine and Leslie Johnstone. Making a large bubble "eat" a smaller bubble shows how objects with different internal air pressure react to each other. The air pressure is greater in the smaller bubble, and that pressure forces it to push into the bigger bubble.

The book offers several recipes for bubble solutions and instructions on a number of nifty tricks -- like making "bubble bees" with a cookie sheet, pennies and the top of an old CD case, or putting a person inside a bubble using a hula hoop and an outdoor swimming tub.

Along the way it also teaches lessons associated with bubbles, like their importance to deep-sea divers, who blow bubbles as they come up relieve pressure in their lungs and who can suffer "the bends" if they ascend too quickly and nitrogen bubbles form in their blood.

In addition to blowing bubbles, Levine and Johnstone encourage children to get into the "kitchen laboratory" in their book "Kitchen Science" (Sterling, ages 6-12).

One colorful science experiment illustrates the concept of acids and bases by adding vinegar to water used to soak purple cabbage. The vinegar turns the water pink, and the addition of baking soda turns it blue, showing how acids and bases react with substances differently.

Another experiment features a balloon that inflates seemingly by itself. The balloon grows with the help of a solution that contains yeast, which gives off carbon dioxide as it grows and fills up the balloon.

In "Fantastic Paper Airplanes" (Sterling, ages 10 up), author Jack Botermans takes a beloved childhood pastime and refines it to an impressive degree. You can find the simple design most of us made back in home room, but the book also includes planes that can perform a double somersault with a backward twist.

Botermans offers diagrams and step-by-step instructions for several winners of Scientific American's international airplane competition. Highlights include the "flying fish" and the T-shaped "paper helicopter."