28 Kids Activity Books With the Write Stuff

Mess-free, reusable coloring book that uses only water to create bright, colorful pictures. Just fill the magic pen with water, and your child will be off and coloring! Once it dries, the colors disappear and the page is ready to be colored again.

Jennie Utsinger said:  These are our go-to travel toys. The only problem is that my boys whip through them in a few minutes! We always need to have a bunch.

This activity book is designed to spark creativity in kids, featuring prompts and illustrations that encourage them to draw, doodle, and imagine, using themes like dinosaurs, robots, and superheroes.

Kelly R said:  My son loved this book that is more creativity book than coloring book. Armed with their imaginations, kids complete half-drawn pictures with prompts like "how will you escape from a crocodile" and "what's under the bed?" These books are great gifts for 6-year-old boys, and check out The Girls' Doodle Book if you're shopping for a girl.

Kid-favorite Pigeon stars in an interactive story with numerous activities that range from traditional to elaborate (writing and drawing prompts, crafts, puppet shows, paper airplanes, games, and more).

Kelly R said:  This activity book is fabulous, and of such high quality that it makes an excellent gift! It's also an incredible bang for the buck when I consider the hours and hours that my daughter spent working on it.

Kelly R said:  This is such a clever series, where kids have to make decisions, doodle, and manipulate the book in order to stay safe. It feels like a more interactive Choose Your Own Adventure. There are a couple books to choose from...we have the Titanic version, where you need to survive the voyage as a passenger, crew member or stowaway.

Phidal sticker book treasury books are large activity books for kids, typically containing hundreds of reusable stickers and many fun pages centered around popular characters or themes. These books aim to entertain children for hours with interactive activities and opportunities to create their own sticker scenes.

Alexandra F. said:  Phidal has a lot of cool, high quality interactive books to keep younger kids busy, but our family especially loves their sticker book treasuries. My favorite thing about them is that the pages are sturdy and well-laminated, so they are truly reusable and last a long time - in fact, my toddler is using his big sister's book from 10 years ago! Because you can reuse the stickers so easily, kids will have fun creating new stories over and over again, and the books do a nice job providing a variety of stickers and pages with different settings to promote this creativity.

Shila said:  I like giving my kids (4 & 6) road trip toys that get them in the zone and focused on a fun project. These paint by sticker books do just that. They are simple, yet rewarding. They also take up little space, make no mess, and can generally be found at an affordable price.

These creative activity books for kids are a cool take on the color-by-numbers concept. Each book contains a series of pictures that start out as a simple numbered grid. Fill in the squares with the right colors to reveal the picture!

This colorful, fill-in guided journal is cool for kids to enjoy a little quiet time and self-reflection in a fun and creative way. Kids can answer questions (with words and/or drawings!) about what their favorite and least favorite dinners are, what they would name a shop if they owned one, and how many teeth they have at this moment in time.

Beginner activity books like this one are great for kids who are just getting started with drawing or writing letters.

Tim Ponisciak said:  Our 5 year old loved his first Kumon tracing book! The pages are easy to understand and this is something your child will be able to do on their own for the most part.

Shila said:  Fickle, cavort, mischievous, jealous... widen your vocab and learn a brand new word every single day, with a simple brainstormer to match. We have the Grade 1 book, and today's word of the day was: permit. "You are not permitted to touch the oven." The whole activity really takes only a couple minutes, and it's actually somewhat of a suspenseful moment.

Erynn said:  For Minecraft-obsessed elementary schoolers like my son, this Minecraft-centered math activity book is ideal. It's not math disguised as fun, but the activities are engaging and involve puzzle solving, decoding clues and secret messages, and word problem practice with Minecraft themes and concepts. Plus, it spans a few grade levels so there are both familiar and challenging problems.

This isn't an activity book that will get tossed away the minute it's completed. Fans of Jeff Kinney's Wimpy Kid series can create a personalized masterpiece with this cool DIY book. Record fun facts and memories, answer probing questions, complete comic strips, and much more. Your kid (or you, if he lets you peek!) will enjoy flipping through it years later to see his custom haunted house design and the list of dressing room requirements for when he's a famous musician.

Tracy Snyder Molina said:  Both of my boys had this book and it was great to keep them engaged for more than a few minutes.

Vanessa M. said:  This is Not a Maths Book by Anna Weltman expands the general concept of mathematics into the creative arts. Make parabolic curves into beautiful works of art, make your own 3D art, learn about Pascal's Patterns, create a squaretangle and more in this extraordinary activity book!

Vanessa M. said:  The bright colors and cute characters invite preschoolers to interact with the fun activity pages of the Big Preschool Workbook. Simple directions like "trace the path" or "circle the pictures that begin with a P" are easy to follow, and cover school readiness basics like numbers, colors, shapes, alphabet, basic phonics, early math and more.

This time capsule allows children to write 12 keepsake letters to their future selves with fun and interesting writing prompts. Letters are sealed and dated with the included stickers, then bound into the paper time capsule to be read many years later when the child is all grown up!