Squirrel and raccoon friends Winky, Skipper, and Tag from The Make-Something Club (1994) reunite on a cold winter day for the making of 12 preschool projects, one for each month of the year. The subtitle boasts fun with crafts, food, and gifts, but some of the activities are merely ideas for play, e.g., arranging chairs draped with a blanket to form a cave. Among the more commonly found projects are fashioning kazoos out of cardboard tubes and sprouting sweet potatoes in a jar. Most are indoor projects, though June and July's involve collecting ants and blowing bubbles, and most require a minimum of household materials. Crafty kids will enjoy the more unusual projects: aluminum-foil light-catcher punch pictures and jigsaw puzzles cut from cereal boxes. Kitchen dabblers will prefer to roll up sandwiches, stuff dates, or poke oranges to insert cloves for pomanders, all with a minimum of mess. The illustrated, kid-friendly instructions have no more than six steps, and the insets of the club members conversing and cavorting will engage preschoolers while parents ready work spaces for action. (Picture book. 3-8)
