The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Art Lab for Kids: 52 Creative Adventures in Drawing, Painting, Printmaking, Paper, and Mixed Media by Susan Schwake

Susan Schwake’s approach in this compact manual is quietly ambitious: deliver fine-art experiences in short, repeatable labs so that a parent, teacher, or small-group leader can run a semester’s worth of explorations with minimal prep and maximum creative payoff. The book is organized as six units (Drawing; Painting; Printmaking; Paper; Mixed Media; plus usage/how-to material) and contains a full year’s worth—52 projects—set up as weekly lessons. 

What the book is (and how it’s built)

The spine of the book is pedagogical clarity. Each lab supplies a concise materials list, step-by-step photographs, a short “Meet the Artist” reference that connects the exercise to a contemporary practitioner, and “Materials Go Further” prompts that extend the activity. Schwake’s labs are deliberately modular: they can be employed as single, playful experiments or concatenated into longer thematic units—an affordance that makes the book useful both for one-off family afternoons and as curriculum backbone for art teachers. 

Tone, voice, and examples

The prose throughout favours the pragmatic and invitational over didactic flourish; instructions read like a skilled teacher at studio side: clear, economical, and encouraging of deviation. Representative phrasing that shows the book’s balance of technique and openness includes lines such as “This step-by-step book offers 52 fun and creative art projects set into weekly lessons,” and concrete illustrative examples: “drawing by creating a whimsical scene on a handmade crayon scratchboard” and “printmaking by using lemons, celery, mushrooms, and other produce to make colourful prints.” These short, concrete descriptions model the pedagogy—teach a technique, then invite play. 

What makes it work

1. Scaffolded skill-building. Labs begin with accessible materials and simple techniques, then layer complexity so children encounter composition, mark-making, and material properties repeatedly and in different contexts. This scaffolding is ideal for mixed-ability groups. 
2. Artist connections. Short “Meet the Artist” notes contextualize exercises within contemporary practice, which elevates projects from craft exercises to informed artistic experiments.
3. Photographic pedagogy. Abundant step photos and multiple finished examples show how the same lab yields divergent outcomes—an implicit lesson about individual voice and variability in artistic process.
4. Flexibility. The labs’ modular nature makes the book usable by parents, librarians, camp counsellors, and classroom teachers—anyone who needs reliable, short lesson plans.

Where it could be stronger

• Depth for older teens: While the book consistently encourages experimentation, several labs would benefit from optional “level-up” variants for high-schoolers who need more conceptual framing or sustained critique prompts.
• Assessment language: For teachers who need rubrics or assessment outcomes, the book’s open-ended ethos is a virtue but leaves a gap: a short appendix with formative assessment suggestions would make it more classroom-ready for standards-driven curricula.
  These are modest limits; they reflect the book’s design choice to be broadly accessible rather than scholastically rigorous.

Authorial authority and series context

The author brings decades of museum, community and classroom experience to the book; the author bio situates her as an artist-teacher who runs an art school and has produced multiple titles in the Lab for Kids series, which explains the book’s blend of studio practice and approachable pedagogy. The book is part of a known Lab for Kids series published by an imprint with a strong crafts-and-how-to list. Quarry Books

Who will get the most from it

• Elementary and middle-school art teachers looking for low-prep, high-impact weekly lessons.
• Parents who want to do more than “craft time” and who want each session to build a real studio habit.
• Community-arts facilitators and librarians who need reproducible, age-flexible labs.

Appraisal

As a compact handbook, the book succeeds. Its combination of clear process, playful materials experiments (from salt in watercolour to vegetable printmaking), and an explicit invitation to make work that reflects the maker’s voice makes it more than a craft manual: it is a practical primer in how art-making teaches attention, problem-solving, and aesthetic judgment. For anyone organizing creative time for children or starting a beginner’s studio program, this is a reliable, well-designed resource that rewards repeated use.