Art Series: Earth-Space Coloring Book

 Imagine a book where you could combine a love of learning, with a love of colouring.   Right now my son is big into astronomy...he's having fun doing experiments, reading and listening, watching youtube videos...and now he can see pictures of what he is learning about in a softcover colouring book AND if he were so inclined...try to replicate what he sees.

Allow me to introduce to you a  new colouring book.   Earth-Space.  This lovely book is put together by Chronicle Books.

This book is beautiful.   The images of space that are photographs taken from the Archives of NASA.  They are breathtakingly beautiful.

Each picture is labelled so we know just what we are looking at.   We see earth from space, corona australis, the orion nebula, stellar snowflake cluster and so much more.

Some of the images are so close you could almost reach out and touch them, while others really point out the grandeur of God to me...that he could make something so interesting to look at, like the Caterpillar of dust and gas.





Each page opens into two page, the first page of the natural phenomena, the second with it broken down into simple lines.   This breaks the natural beauty seem more attainable to colour.  I have to admit though, I felt intimidated by the idea of trying to replicate the variety of colours presented.  BUT since each image is broken down simple lines, it is easier diverge... take for instance the image of rings of Saturn seen below...the colouring page does not depict ALL the rings, so you can use the colours you have at hand, or if desired...you could completely change it up.  It's a colouring book... do what you want eh?

As you can see, each colouring page is done with simple lines.  Allowing each area to be coloured in sections, or swirls or whatever you wish.   These lines give you connecting points to the real picture so you can build off that.

Just a fascinating colouring book, that at first (to me looked intimidating) but as I continued to look through and think about it, I just found it fascinating as it's different then other colouring books, it's more free form with the lines just providing a grounding to base one's work off of.  Mix colours, don't be constrained by lines, and just have fun recreating.

I can EASILY see this being used in an astronomy class with students as well.  Even just to look at the pictures to show the beauty that can be found in the galaxy above us.  :)


Earth Space Coloring book: Photographs from the Archives of NASA.

Published by Chronicle Books.
Pages: 80
Size 8.63 x 11

Reviewed for: Raincoast Books

STEM: Light Up Planetarium

Since battling illness is the name of the game in this house lately, today I decided to switch things up for the lad.

"Do your reading and then we'll work on a couple of your boxes okay?"   says I.

"GREAT MOM" was the enthusiastic response.  (good to have enthusiasm again)  :)

Over the past year we've been working with kiwi crates, I decided to bump up the the tinker crates, and Light Up Planterium is the first one we received.     Below you will see my son unpacking the box.  It comes in the mail addressed to him.

 

Tinker Creates is a great way to teach and entertain youth from 9-16 years old.   I discovered that the instructions are different, they came as a fold out page rather than a booklet. 

My son had absolutely no problem following the instructions and figuring out where he wanted to go.  He was able to easily look ahead and problem solve before reaching the next stage as needed.




HA!!!   I made my first ever presentation, cool eh?

One thing I couldn't figure out how to show you was how neat all those pin holes stars look against a dark ceiling.  Just couldn't get a good shot regardless of what I did with the camera.

But seriously, tinker crates are a great deal of fun and you can take the learning from them into so many different directions.  Do them as is or put them into a small unit study.  We're studying astronomy this year so this box was an excellent fit.  You can order individual crates from Kiwi Crates from what I recall, so give them a look see and figure out what you can use with your students.  :) 

your own planetarium?

From Principled Discovery I learned that one can make your "Very own planetarium on your computer". Sounds neat to me! The place to go is called Stellarium.

From their website

Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope.
It is being used in planetarium projectors. Just set your coordinates and go.