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Fun and activities
Colouring pages, paper aeroplanes, origami and other things to make: printables for a rainy Saturday rather than a routine that needs fixing.
5 topics · 47 printable sheets
Printables in this section
1 sheetHigh contrast baby cards
Thirty two free black and white cards for newborns, four to an A4 page, with patterns, shapes, faces and animals to prop up during tummy time or hold at the distance a new baby can actually focus on.
18 sheetsColouring pages
Eighteen free printable colouring pages, cats, dogs, sea creatures, diggers, tractors, cars, unicorns, shapes, numbers and fruit, all black and white line art, ready for A4.
19 sheetsChristmas colouring pages and crafts
Nineteen free printable Christmas sheets. Eleven colouring pages from simple to detailed, four cards to colour and fold, a Father Christmas mask, gingerbread chains and paper chain strips.
4 sheetsColouring bookmarks
Four free printable sheets of colouring bookmarks, sixteen in total. Two sheets of simple designs for younger children and two of detailed patterns for older ones. Colour them in, cut them out and use them.
5 sheetsPaper aeroplane templates
Five free printable paper aeroplane templates with the fold lines already on the paper. Numbered creases on page one, big illustrated steps on page two, from a four step beginner plane up to a stunt plane with adjustable tabs.
Printables that aren’t trying to fix anything
Most of this site is about getting something done: a habit started, a week organised, a record kept for somebody in a lanyard. This section has no job like that at all.
This is for the wet Saturday, the long wait in a hospital corridor, and the two hours before your mother-in-law arrives. Nothing to tick off, nothing to finish, no progress being measured by anybody.
What’s worth printing
Colouring pages are the reliable one. They work across a huge age range, they need nothing but a pen, and a child will often stay with one far longer than with anything more elaborate that took you twenty minutes to set up.
Things to make, like the paper aeroplanes, buy you a different sort of time. They need an adult for the first go and then usually run themselves, which is the dream. The paper aeroplane templates are the clearest example: a quarter of an hour of folding, then as long as you like throwing them down the hall.
Print these in black and white
Colouring sheets especially. The empty space is the entire point, and a pre-coloured page manages to defeat the exercise and empty a cartridge at the same time.
On screens
Nobody here is claiming a printed activity is morally superior to a tablet. But paper has two real advantages on a difficult afternoon: it never runs out of battery, and nobody argues about whose turn it is.
Nothing here needs finishing
No progress, no targets, nothing to complete. Everything else on this site is trying to fix something, and children notice the difference between an activity and a task disguised as one.
Resist the urge to attach learning to it. A wet Saturday doesn’t need outcomes.
Print several, not one
The commonest mistake with anything in this section. One sheet and two children is a negotiation. Four sheets is an afternoon.
They cost almost nothing in ink, and a spare in a bag has rescued a great many appointments and long journeys.
Sit down with them
Colouring alongside a child, badly, does more for how long they stay with it than any amount of encouragement from across the room.
You don’t have to be good at it. You have to be there and not looking at a phone.