🖍 HOMESCHOOL ARTS: Color Our Collections Week!

❡ February 6th update: It’s now Thursday of CoC week and the new coloring booklets have yet to appear. Not sure what’s up. This is the week that was advertised, as can be seen on other websites also. They may be experiencing technical problems. In the meantime you can still find the coloring booklets from last year (2024) on the Color Our Collections website and download and save them for use throughout the year. 🎨

Calling all homeschool artists, scribblers, painters, colorists, and illuminators: the week of 3–7 February 2025 (Monday–Friday) is Color Our Collections Week! This is one of the best homeschool art opportunities you can participate in all year. It’s free, it’s suitable for all ages, and you can make it last for months.

Color Our Collections Week is a fun, educational, international project that was started by the Library of the New York Academy of Medicine, and it now involves more than a hundred major libraries and museums around the world. These institutions scan historic black-and-white images from their collections of rare books and assemble them into small coloring booklets that you and your students can print and illuminate as you see fit.

The new coloring booklets for 2025 will begin appearing on Monday, February 3rd, on the Color Our Collections website. As of this writing, the booklets for 2024 are also still online and you can download them as well:

• ➢ Color Our Collections Coloring Booklets (colorourcollections.org)

These wonderful free printables include everything from science to Shakespeare, architecture to medieval art, natural history to engineering, and much more.

There are enough pages available that you could download a year’s worth of coloring opportunities for your young artists. (That’s in fact a good plan: download and save now, and then print out later as the spirit moves.) These coloring booklets are not only fun, they are full of educational value as well. Don’t miss this opportunity for creativity and learning.

What illuminating discoveries have you and your students been making in your homeschool this Orion Term? 🖍

❡ Explore more: You can use this annual event for much more than just coloring. Each booklet comes from a specific library or museum. Look up their websites, pay them an online visit, locate them in your world atlas, and more. Expand your students’ appreciation for the whole universe of learning. 🏛

❡ Dukedoms large enough: Have you found all the local libraries in your area? There may be more than you realize, and there’s no better homeschool field trip than a field trip to a new library! The WorldCat Library Finder will help you find all the library collections near you — public and private, large and small — and the WorldCat catalog itself will help you locate the closest copy of almost any book in the world. 🏛

❡ Books in the running brooks: The sidebar on the River Houses website has links to several wonderful online library collections that we like to explore. Why not sit yourself down at a large screen for a while (rather than a phone) and give them a browse. 🖥

❡ When in doubt, go to the library: This is one of our regular Homeschool Books & Libraries posts. Add your name to our weekly mailing list and get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 📫

❡ Homeschool calendars: We have a whole collection of free, printable, educational homeschool calendars and planners available on our main River Houses calendar page. They will help you create a light and easy structure for your homeschool year. Give them a try today! 🗓

❡ Support our work: If you enjoy our educational materials, please support us by starting your regular Amazon shopping from our very own homeschool teaching supplies page. When you click through from our page, any purchase you make earns us a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you for helping us to keep going and growing! 🛒

❡ Join us! The aim of the River Houses project is to create a network of friendly local homeschool support groups — local chapters that we call “Houses.” Our first at-large chapter, Headwaters House, is now forming and is open to homeschoolers everywhere. Find out how to become one of our founding members on the Headwaters House membership page. 🏡