Some parents work to help their children maintain reading levels over the summer break, but it's important not to forget about writing skills. Recent MEAP (Michigan Educational Assessment Program) writing test results show that students could use improvement with writing, too. Writing opportunities are now more prevalent for students with the rise in use of the Internet —think blogging, contributing to wikis, creating websites, contributing comments, etc. But just assigning your child a practice writing topic will get the same reaction to suggestions for him or her to clean the bedroom: eyes rolling, audible sighs and some good old-fashioned resistance!

If a student gets to pick the topic, there is some ownership and motivation to go along with the assignment. My daughters were given that very opportunity this past school year. The topics were, um, interesting. First there was the report about the "history of the basketball." No, not the sport, the ball. I actually did not mind this one since we have soft spot for basketball in our family. My dad played hoops for University of Michigan.

Then there was the report on "Hail" (notice a theme here?) and finally, to make things even more interesting, there were the reports on toilets and garbage cans. As you can see, these are not the most scholarly topics, but they are topics that we actually had fun with. It was a great way to practice information literacy skills while researching the topics. The girls had to evaluate resources for credibility, look for appropriate resources and use keywords effectively for searching. My daughters loved looking for information and reading more about their topics.

So when I ran across these coloring books — yes coloring books — I thought that they would be a great ways to encourage writing projects opportunities at home.

Old-fashioned coloring books do provide some creativity. You can color Cinderella’s dress black and make her a redhead. When I was young, I was awed when our babysitter added pink blush and blue eye shadow to my Barbie coloring book. Of course when I tried it, my Barbie picture looked more like the Insane Clown Posse — frustrating.

Taro Gomi, probably better known for Everyone Poops, has three very thick (more than 300 pages) coloring books: Scribbles, Doodles, and Squiggles. Gomi’s coloring books are open-ended, thought provoking and spark the imagination. There is no right or wrong way to fill in the many pages of the books.

The pictures on the vanilla-colored pages are unfinished line drawings with plenty of space for a child to add what ever he or she can imagine. Each page includes a writing prompt suggestion like:

Some pages pose a challenge:

Each of these pages may inspire detailed responses that can easily morph into writing opportunities. For example, after filling the boy and girl with mosquito bites (mine are arranged like my favorite constellations), it is easy to imagine a story behind it: They were stargazing the other night and they saw a shooting star and three satellites streak across the sky. It was too exciting to go inside even though they felt as if they were getting eaten alive by those pesky buggers.

The summary on the back of one of the books states it nicely: "This book is not just for coloring, but for doodling, drawing, imagining and thinking!" And writing, I'll add!

Scribbles, Doodles, and Squiggles are recommended for ages 3 to 99+. Visit Taro Gomi’s website to sample some of the pages and get busy drawing (and writing) .

Lisa Bankey is a parent, an Enrichment Facilitator for the Ann Arbor Public Schools, and a librarian-in-training who blogs about Children’s Literature for AnnArbor.com. Lisa can be reached at lisabookblog@gmail.com.