Farmer's Boy Copywork & Coloring Book: A Review

I want to thank Dori Oakes for introducing me to a lovely Randolph Caldecott work, through her Farmer's Boy Copywork and Coloring Book- andfor prompting me to look into some of his other works. I discovered that many of the songs and rhymes I loved as a little girl have been illustrated by this 19th century artist, for whom was named the children's literature award for excellence in picture books.

A rarity in e-books prepared from public domain texts, Dori has given her source in the book and actually provides a link to the full colour edition of the book at the Internet Archive. She encourages us to download the colour book for reading at bedtime. Making e-books from public domain texts is a very time consuming thing, and one that is usually done with a lot of love for the original text. While most producers of this kind of work are hesitant to share their sources, it is the educator who truly cares about the art and about the homeschooling community who places her emphasis on sharing this way!

The copywork in this e-book is manuscript, written on black primary lines and intended to be traced. This would be a good place to begin with a younger student (e.g. kindergarten) who has begun to form the alphabet, and wants to "do more" and be like the older kids. The text is a little uneven - some pages have darker print than others - and as it is solid print rather than dashed, it isn't terribly suitable for tracing with a pencil. I would recommend using markers, as is suggested in the book. Another alternative, and perhaps one that will yield better results over the long-term, is to have children trace the copy with their fingers. If they want, they can write the passages out on lined paper of your choice.

The artwork is a little faded or blurry on some pages, which seems to have been an issue of the original scan rather than anything done in preparing this book. I would love to see it "cleaned up" though this would likely require a great deal of time & effort, whether done by hand or with the assistance of drawing software. This would result in a very large increase of the price of the product, which at the moment is quite reasonable. From my own experience, small children aren't bothered if some of their colouring pages a little pale or fuzzy, so this doesn't really bring the quality of the book down in my opinion.

Many thanks to Oakes Homeschool Consulting for this product, and for all the wonderful contributions to our community! Affordable copies are available from CurrClick, who provided the review copy used for this article.