My daughter was given some realistic animal and bird colouring books when she was younger but they never really interested her.  However I liked the look of the books so I kept them packed on our bookshelf (I hate giving anything away when I can see potential for us to use it in a future project of some sort – yes I HOARD educational goodies). Over the past week while we have been at home a lot more than usual (winter bugs) my son ended up going through the bookcase looking for something to do and he spotted these books.  Now he loves learning about animals so he immediately took them out and started paging through.  The first thing he commented on was that he liked the fact that colouring books included coloured pictures of what the animals look like in real life – he likes to be accurate with his animals.

And he started, first with the Colouring Birds book.

He sat and coloured for ages, moving onto the African Mammal book.  Taking breaks to read the short blurbs about the animals

and having long inspections of the example pictures that are included in the middle of each book.

He flipped between the different books selecting all different kinds of animals.

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But it  kept him busy for ages, and and he came back to the books the next day

If you have kids who are interested in animals and want to work on realistic yet not overly complicated pictures with good examples of what the animals truly does look like then this books definitely ticked all the boxes for my little guy. (Tip the paper is nice but I still would not use felt tip pens in these books as I think the ink would come through the pages – my son stuck to his colouring pencils and they worked really nicely)

And the other up side was I could show my hubbie that all those educational items that I hang on “just in case” they may come in handy actually do sometimes end up getting used.

The three books that we currently have are African Mammals (Read, Colour and Keep), Colouring Birds and African Birds (Read, colour and keep) by Sally MacLarty (2015-04-19) and after searching online my son found African Reptiles & Frogs (Read, Colour and Keep) and has just requested it as a Christmas present.

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