Karen E. Smith / Karen ESmith
Suddenly, It was Pareidolia! is Karen E. Smith’s third children’s book about discovering nature literacy. The rhyming story is about two bored teens who sit around the house wondering what to do. In their boredom they eventually go for a walk in the woods and to their surprise, they discover something very interesting in nature. They used their cell phones to record what they had found and then they talk this over with their researcher Auntie who informs them that they have recorded something very scientific. The main theme of the book is how the two teens were bored until they discovered pareidolia. When this happened, by accident, they suddenly became interested in the many ways that this phenomenon takes over their vision. Pareidolia is known as a type of apophenia, a term for seeing patterns in random data. A common example is faces in the clouds. A famous example is seeing an image of a man on the surface of the moon or, alternatively, an image of a rabbit on the surface of the moon. The book is written to support literacy development and connection to nature, especially for urban students who often do not have the chance to be involved in nature literacies. The book promotes inter-generational reading practices especially through the interchangable use of both paper-based books and e-readers.
