by Barney Saltzberg
2010 / 28 pages
Rating: Good/GREAT/Give

I play a “scribble game” with my girls. One person makes a quick jot on a page, and the other person has to turn these random lines into some kind of person, animal, or face. It’s a cooperative game – the scribbler can’t be too messy or it’s impossible to play – so we added one more rule. If you can’t turn the scribble into something, then you can challenge the scribbler to show you how it could be done. In other words, you don’t want to make a scribble you wouldn’t want to deal with yourself (a little Matthew 7:12 here). In addition to being quite the portable travel game, it’s a fun way for kids to work through any perfectionist impulses. Can’t make a scribble perfect, can you?

Beautiful Oops! is another great tool to help whatever young perfectionists you know. Saltzberg highlights the joy that can come from running with your artistic mistakes. Clever foldouts show first a mistake – a couple of splotches of ink – and then how those “oops” can be turned into a pair of wheels for a jeep. A tear in the page can become the open craggy mouth of an alligator. Smudges and smears and coffee cup stains can all be turned into something fun.

The only caution with this book is practical. It’s built out of sturdy cardboard, but has elements of a pop-up book, so it might need some adult supervision if it’s to last more than a little while. That said, it would be a great one for parents to read with their preschoolers. If you’re looking to make this same point – don’t let minor mistakes slow you down – to an older 7 to 11-year-old audience be sure to check out Corinna Luyken’s The Book of Mistakes.

See the Beautiful Oops! book trailer below.