When Cell Press put out its first coloring book in 2010, I had a 4-year-old, a 2-year-old, and a newborn. Cell Press employees were offered up to five books, so although the scientific content in Coloring with Cell was a bit beyond my crew at the time, I snagged my allotment and stashed it away for future use.

Recently, Cell Press came out with its second coloring book,Neurons at Play. Five years had passed, and I thought the boys were ready to color with Cell.

Well, except that they don't really like coloring books.

They like to color. And draw, and paint, and even scribble. But they have some kind of ingrained opposition to staying within other people's lines (in case you're wondering, yes, this does pose significant parenting challenges). So how best could I use these two wonderful resources with my kids?

By the way, although you might be thinking that coloring books are typically aimed at kids, the Cell Press coloring books are actually quite popular with grown-ups. We're pretty sure you’ll find copies in many biology labs and that, even when researchers tell us they're grabbing a copy for their son or daughter, the real interest is theirs (hey, that's how I ended up with my own five copies). Indeed, as I explain below, the vocabulary is definitely aimed at educated readers.

Apart from the intended audience, the two books couldn't be more different. Coloring with Cell is a collection of biology-inspired but otherwise unrelated illustrations and activities, such as a maze, word search, and dot-to-dot, with a small amount of explanatory scientific text to let us know what we’re looking at. For example, we might learn that "fat cells called adipocytes store energy from the food we eat" on a page where we can color in the adipocytes or that "there are 100 billion neurons in your brain" as we choose a color scheme for our neurons. However, there is no running narrative.

Neurons at Play, on the other hand, is a cohesive story in the form of a comic strip, but it doesn't have any text at all after the first page.

At first, after I'd downloaded and printed Neurons at Play, I thought I'd had technical problems that had somehow caused the text to go missing. But upon closer examination, I realized that there weren't supposed to be words after that first page, where we're pictorially introduced to the strip's main characters, microglia and neurons, and learn a little bit about what microglia do. After that, we watch as naughty neurons make a mess at the playground and the microglia response team comes in to pick up the trash and discipline the unruly neurons. It's easy to make up our own narrative.

My kids and I had recently learned about neurons and how they serve as the body's communication network. Neurons at Play thus didn't require a lot of advance explanation from me; I only had to explain some tricky vocabulary from the introductory page, where we learn, for example, that microglia "engulf cell debris" and "help establish correct wiring of neuronal synapses." After a brief explanation, even my kindergartener was ready to "read" the comic strip on his own and was chuckling over the trouble those misbehaving neurons were getting into.

"Dad, the microglia were vacuuming the sand box!" my son told his dad later. After asking my son to repeat himself several times, my husband turned to me for interpretation. "What is he saying?"

I guess "microglia" isn’t a word one typically expects to hear from a kindergartener.

In contrast, our use of Coloring with Cell involved a lot more parental involvement and instruction. The book's organization also seemed to lend itself more to use as a jumping-off point for us to learn about the topics and concepts discussed or depicted on each page rather than as something we would page through all in one sitting.

For example, the first page shows a typical cell with its organelles. We turned to page 2 to zoom in on the nucleus and its DNA. On page 3, we learned that cells store information in DNA and that DNA codes this information by using only four letters: A, G, C, and T.

I additionally explained that those letters stand for the nucleotides adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine and gave a brief overview of how those four nucleotides encode information the cell uses to build proteins out of amino acids (I used this resource from the Center for Nanoscale Science at Pennsylvania State University).

Then, we took a detour to make our own 3D paper models of the DNA double helix. This was at the suggestion of my colleague Milka Kostic, who recently pointed CrossTalk readers to a fun collection of paper models (think molecular origami) put together by the Protein Data Bank.

Milka's favorite model was the tRNA. I think we'll have to try that next; I have to say that the folds required for the DNA model were a bit challenging for me and my kindergartener. My second grader obviously has superior origami skills; his turned out quite nicely.

We then came up with a short phrase to write in the DNA code. I was inspired by a beading activity suggested on the website of the San Francisco Exploratorium. The idea is to come up with a phrase to spell with any of the 20 amino acid single-letter abbreviations (B, J, O, U, X, and Z do not stand for any amino acids). Then, translate your phrase from amino acid abbreviations to the three-letter DNA codons that code for those amino acids (here’s a table you can use). If you have beads, you can then substitute a color for each of the four nucleotides that make up the codons and create a necklace or bracelet with your secret phrase. For example, the codon GGC might be represented by blue, blue, red in your color scheme.

We didn't have any beads to complete the activity, but it seemed like there was general interest in acquiring some.

By now we'd only made it to page 3 in the 24-page coloring book. We'll have to save activities related to the plasma membrane, mitochondria, cell division, and other topics for another day.

So it turns out that my kids do like coloring books. My kindergartener even colored in one of them a little bit (and not just when I asked him to do so for the picture included here). Go ahead—download a Cell Press coloring book to share with a child in your life!