Art Fraud Detective : Spot the Difference, Solve the Crime!

Rating:
Summary: Great for homeschooling
Review: It's a mystery in a museum. Wow! If you like art or if you like mysteries or both, this books for you. It comes with a magnifying glass so you can check to see which of the paintings are frauds and which are the real things. There are even thieves to find. It's just a lot of fun. Learn art while having a bit of fun!

Rating:
Summary: Just a neato book!
Review: It's a mystery in a museum. Wow! If you like art or if you like mysteries or both, this books for you. It comes with a magnifying glass so you can check to see which of the paintings are frauds and which are the real things. There are even thieves to find. It's just a lot of fun. Learn art while having a bit of fun!

Rating:
Summary: Great for homeschooling
Review: My 5 year old daughter absolutely adored this book, we spent 4 hours on one day pretending to be detectives. I like the fact that you make your own chart on a seperate piece of paper to keep track of the bad guys....an added math lesson to the art history. I was occasionally frustrated that the "real" artwork was so small compared to the fake, it was hard on my eyes at times....and also that sometimes the pictures were on diagonal from each other. It was much easier when the "real" and fake pictures were directly in line with each other. (This may not have bothered me if I was looking at the book by myself, but when sharing the book, it was annoying). All in all, this was so much fun and interesting.

Rating:
Summary: Great idea for a book, but one major flaw in execution
Review: This is a beautiful, unusually instructional and engaging book introducing children (and adults!) to an enormous range of master artworks spanning 500 or so years. It sold out immediately at our school book fair and has been ordered by many members of the faculty and by parents. We couldn't keep the kids away from it! With it's 'game' format including a magnifier, it is lots of fun and fairly challenging. For the holidays, I'm using it as a centerpiece with accompanying art supplies for family gifts. And, what a great price!

Rating:
Summary: Well-done changes get you to look closely
Review: This is a very clever book, and well executed. Some of the small changes to the paintings are very clever, and have been very well-done on a computer. You really have to look the whole painting over closely, since the way the mystery is designed, you might not be sure you have all the changes. I had to go back on several and look them over again to make sure I had everything, and it was fun to discover a change I had missed the first time. It is true as another reviewer wrote that the "answer" appears right under the last page of painting, so it would be easy to glance at it. The author made the print small, thinking one would need the magnifying glass to see it, but she should have made it smaller still. I could easily read it naked-eye. The fun part of the book, though, is not so much to identify the good-guy, but to completely find all the changes in the paintings. If you do it right, without cheating, it's a lot of fun.

Rating:
Summary: My kids are capivated by this book!
Review: What a way to expose your children to great works and concepts in fine art! My children couldn't put this one down - they even squabbled over whose turn it was to use it!

Rating:
Summary: My kids are capivated by this book!
Review: What a way to expose your children to great works and concepts in fine art! My children couldn't put this one down - they even squabbled over whose turn it was to use it!