A Sarnia Publisher Wants to Turn Colouring Time Into Life-Skills Time
Coloring books have always been about keeping kids busy with crayons. A new series out of Sarnia wants them to do a bit more than that — sparking the kind of everyday conversations that quietly teach kids how the world works.
CS Factor Book Publishing Inc., a Sarnia-based educational publisher, has just launched Common Sense Factor Kids, a line of colouring and activity books built around practical life skills. Rather than treating colouring as pure downtime, the series uses it as a jumping-off point for curiosity, observation, problem-solving, and a sense of personal responsibility.
The First Book: Home Awareness
The debut title, Common Sense Factor Kids: Home Awareness Colouring & Activity Book, is aimed at children ages five to 10 and is already available on Amazon. It walks kids through the basics of understanding their own homes — the kind of practical awareness that usually gets passed down informally, if it gets passed down at all.
It won't be the only one. The publisher has several more titles in the works, covering:
Fire safety
Skilled trades awareness
Financial literacy
Community awareness
Healthy living
Nature awareness
Senior safety
That range says a lot about the philosophy behind the series: life skills aren't just one subject, they're a whole category of everyday knowledge that rarely gets a dedicated place in a kid's day.
Where the Idea Came From
The company was founded by Peter Last, who spent more than 40 years working in the skilled trades, homeowner education, and maintenance — and, notably, driving a school bus. According to the publisher, it was those bus rides, along with conversations with homeowners, coworkers, and community members, that planted the seed for the whole idea.
Last has framed the philosophy simply: kids' natural curiosity gives parents, grandparents, caregivers, and educators a built-in opportunity to pass on knowledge and experience. The books are designed to be a prompt for exactly that kind of exchange, rather than a replacement for it.
Each book in the series is built around four goals:
Teaching through practical, hands-on learning
Encouraging real conversations between kids and the adults around them
Supporting communities through educational partnerships and fundraising
Introducing kids to basic business and entrepreneurial ideas
Beyond the Books
CS Factor Book Publishing isn't limiting itself to bookshelves. The company also partners with schools, nonprofits, businesses, municipalities, and other community organizations to build out educational resources.
One current example is Education Forward by Common Sense Factor, a community initiative aimed at helping homeowners better understand their own homes while pointing them toward trusted professionals. In its Sarnia-Lambton pilot, the initiative is teaming up with the Alzheimer Society of Sarnia-Lambton and Bluewater Home Hardware Building Centre — a pairing that hints at a broader vision connecting home knowledge, community support, and generational learning.
The Bigger Picture
There's something appealing about the low-tech simplicity of the approach: no app, no screen, just a colouring page that gives a kid and an adult a reason to talk. In a world where so much "educational content" competes for attention through screens, this series is betting that a crayon and a good question can do just as much.
For a small local publisher, it's an ambitious rollout — eight planned titles covering everything from fire safety to financial literacy — but the underlying idea is refreshingly straightforward: the everyday conversations we already have with kids are worth more structure, and worth passing on.
More information on the series and CS Factor's community partnerships is available at CSFactorKids.com.
Based on reporting from The Sarnia Journal, July 20, 2026.
