Science Arts: Discovering Science Through Art Experiences (Bright Ideas for Learning

by MaryAnn F. Kohl, Jean Potter

"ScienceArts" builds upon natural curiosity as children experience and explore basic science concepts as they create over 200 beautiful and amazing art experiments. Projects use common household materials and art supplies. The art activities are open-ended and easy to do with one science-art experiment per page, fully illustrated and kid-tested. The book inclues three indexes and an innovative charted Table of Contents. Suitable for home, school, museum programs, or childcare, all ages. Kids call this the "ooo-ahhh" book.

Examples of projects
- Crystal Bubbles
- Dancing Rabbits
- Building Beans
- Magnetic Rubbing
- Stencil Leaves
- Magic Cabbage
- Marble Sculpture
- Immiscibles
- Paint Pendulum
- Ice Structures
- Bottle Optics
- Erupting Colors
- Chromatography

1993 Benjamin Franklin Gold Award, Education/Teaching/Academic
1993 Benjamin Franklin Silver Award, Interior Design
1993 Benjamin Franklin Silver Award, Book Cover
1993 Washington Press Communicator Award, First Place Winner, Non-Fiction Book

Genres: Nonfiction, Art, Parenting, Science

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Read more about me at my website if you wish.
http:// www. brightring. com
I write art books for children, parents, teachers, and homeschoolers.
And I love love love art for kids!!!

My blog:
http://maryannfkohl.typepad.com/blog/

Reviews

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just started and loving the formatting. Clear illustrations. One 'recipe' per page. (Minimum) age levels and lesson plan goals and other useful tags for every one. Chart like a database or spreadsheet as the table of contents. Many more activities than I've usually seen in these books.

Edit: age level tag is for difficulty of experiment/recipe, not for educational level of concept. Too bad! You'll have to judge for yourselves what your children/students are ready to actually learn about.

For example, the first few lessons are focused on Diffusion, Absorption, Evaporation, etc. Only drawback I see so far is the need to have good paper and tempera paint powder, but hopefully you have them already if you're teaching arts.

Ages 3-10, and of course older children and adults can have fun and get reinforcement of the lessons by doing them anyway. I almost wish I had tempera so I could do the paint with oil experiments.
---
Got a little further. Realizing that there are quite a few materials that I don't have.

I'm not sure how likely ordinary families are likely to have them, either. I imagine most who already have arts and crafts set ups do have them. And K-3 classrooms either do or can access them. Ordinary home-schooling families might have to be part of a cooperative though. I just don't know.
---
Ok, so the ones I really want to do are Spin a Color Wheel to see White (or at least pale gray), Casein plastic from milk (next time, if ever, a jug goes bad in our fridge), and Crayon critters ornaments (if we ever have access to broken crayon scraps again).

So, to sum, different audiences will enjoy this more or less depending on access to resources, number of learners, artistic bent of learners and especially of leader.... But I do recommend it to interested readers, if only because Cross-Curricular is a good thing.

Edit: I've made a Listopia for these kinds of books. Please add and vote for your favorites.
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/1...

[Susan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh. Most of the activities are really 'young' and kind of kitschy. I also found that many of the activities are very similar to one another, even though the author pretended otherwise by putting them in different chapters. Actually, to me it would have made more sense if she had grouped them.

[Karebear · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh this is fantastic!! I loved being able to do art things and also make the science connection! So good for kids. Probably start at ages 3+. Lots of ideas I've never thought of. Recipes and steps to do so many things broken into the 4 seasons. Very cool! I keep checking it out from the library to get more ideas!

[Christina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am ambivalent about MaryAnn Kohl's books. Some are great, with simple, helpful art projects. Others seem contrived and forced. This one is sort-of in-between. I liked many of the activities, although the "scientific" explanations often seemed uninteresting. Still, it may be worth owning.

[Artlab]

Discovering Science through art experiences

[Amy Rhilinger · Rating 3 out of 5]

definitely more for younger kids. Simple projects with scientific principle's explained or at least referred to.

[Nancy P · Rating 5 out of 5]

As we work to include more science in our early childhood programs, this book makes it easy to coordinate topics.

[MaryAnn Kohl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Children love the art experiments in ScienceArts. They are fascated!