Micah Blake’s latest project was born when he took some visiting friends to the reef off Marathon this past summer.
“It was a whole new world for them; they loved it,” said Blake. “I thought a coloring book for the kids would be an amazing souvenir. I want to share what my family and I experience all the time.”
Blake spent the past couple of months working on the Florida Keys Underwater World coloring and activity book. He said it incorporates many good things — education, environmental awareness, therapy and fun. Besides the black and white pages waiting to be festooned with color, there are also pages that feature mazes or hidden word puzzles or outlines of animals where kids connect the numbered dots to reveal the shape.
Blake and his wife and two children live aboard their boat in Boot Key Harbor. The kids — 10 and 11 — are homeschooled. HIs daughter is working on her own story about an octopus, while his son is buzzing through the classics. It’s not Blake’s first publication, nor likely his last. In the meantime, he keeps busy teaching music classes (he’s a music major) on udemy.com, an online academy with 35 million students and 57,000 instructors teaching courses in over 65 languages.
Find the book at local retailers, or purchase it through amazon.com by searching “Florida Keys coloring.” It retails for about $10 and will soon be available in local shops such as Sweet Savannah’s in Marathon.
