Friday, July 10, 2015

Book Review: Made With Dad by Chris Barnardo

Made with Dad: From Wizards’ Wands to Japanese Dolls, Craft Projects to Build, Make, and Do with Your Kids
By Chris Barnardo
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: May 5, 2015
ASIN: 9781632207227

Amazon Synopsis:

Releasing in time for Father's Day, Made With Dad features fifty unique, fabulous projects for fathers to make with their children. Projects include everything from samurai swords to pocket-size dolls, wizard wands to paper zoos.

All projects can made from affordable, easy-to-find items—often regular household ones already owned. Full-color photographs, line drawings, and detailed instructions provide an easy, visually lush, and family—friendly manual.

This is a book for fun and bonding, one boys, girls, and adults will enjoy. It will allow families to create objects to play with everyday or display in their rooms, and to create memories that will last a lifetime.

Book Links

 My Thoughts:

Made With Dad is a 253 page paperback book filled with ideas from cooking, crafting, model-making and experimenting. Projects range in age from suitability for children 6 year to 12+. This book was created with the single father in mind to help provide ideas for spending quality time with his children.

The book is divided into sections with the first section labelled “Before You Start”, giving you information about materials you probably should have on hand in order to complete the projects – things like a hot glue gun, double sided tape, Polymorph. This section explains what the material is and what it is used for.

There are 7 project sections: Easy Projects, Arts and Crafts, Waves and Wheels, Great Adventures, Final Frontiers, Happy Holidays, and Advanced Models. Most sections have projects for children age 6 can do. There are plenty of interesting activities and projects for both boys and girls. The projects themselves will provide a catalyst for further activities. For example, after creating the floating container ship the parent and child might go to a local park where they can spend the afternoon floating it on a pond.

At the end of each section there is a short “Being There” page that provides suggestions on how to provide stability and help develop the father’s relationship with the child.

If you purchase the Kindle version of the book, you’ll want access to the templates for the project and if you buy the paperback version you won’t want to cut up your book to use the templates. The author has provided a website where you can download some of the templates from the book. Click here to access that website. Coupling this book with the author’s website dadcando.com any father whether single or not has a powerful tool for developing quality time and relationships with his children.

I really liked the projects in this book. I thought they would be fun activities for any father (or mother) to do with their child. The suggestions in the “Being There” pages are good practical parenting skills. I would highly recommend this book both for its activities and for the supports that it can provide to a single parent. I gave Made With Dad 5 stars out of 5.


Thank you to the publishers for providing a copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review. A positive opinion was not required. All thoughts are my own.

About the Author:

Chris is the son of two GPs, and the eldest of six. Always preoccupied with art and design, he left school at eighteen to work as a Studio Junior in a Graphic Studio in London. After a short period as a Graphic Artist in an advertising agency in Sharja, (UAE), Chris came back to the UK and joined a London advertising agency and over eight years rose to become Creative Director of his own design company, Designer’s Inc. 

 In 1992 he left the Design industry to take a fulltime first degree, in Biomedical Science and Engineering, for which he gained a First Class Honours BEng.

In 1994 Chris started working as a Design and Development Engineer at a contract design and development consultancy based in Cambridge, UK. Always an inventor and designer at heart, he is a named inventor on over 25 patents. In 2001 his Development Group was spun out from the consultancy and used venture capital funding to create a manufacturing company to make thin flexible plastic displays that he had co-invented with one of his work colleagues. 

Chris is a single dad and father of four beautiful children who are 12, 14, 17 and 24 years old. 

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