Colouring pages

Which page to print for which child

The instinct is to reach for the most elaborate sheet on offer, and children under about five usually do better with the least. Large areas and thick outlines mean a satisfying result from a hand that can’t yet be precise, and a satisfying result is what makes them start a second one.

For a toddler, start with the shapes, the numbers or one of the sleeping animals. For a five to seven year old, the sea scenes, the tractor and the street of cars have enough going on to hold them. From about eight, the busiest pages (the reef, the octopus with all its patterned tentacles) are the ones that will occupy an afternoon rather than ten minutes.

Colouring is doing more than it looks like

It’s quiet, portable and needs no supervision, which is most of the reason anyone prints one. But it’s also steady practice at pencil control, at staying with something, and at making a decision about which colour goes where, none of which feels like work to the child doing it.

That’s the argument for keeping a stack within reach rather than producing one as an emergency measure.

Where these come into their own

Waiting rooms. The hour before dinner. Journeys where a screen would win the argument but not the evening. Restaurants, if you’re brave. A folded sheet and three pencils take up no space in a bag and have rescued a great many appointments.

Nobody is claiming paper is morally superior to a tablet. It just has two advantages on a difficult afternoon: it doesn’t run out of battery, and nobody argues about whose turn it is.

Don’t comment on the colours

My daughter spent most of one summer colouring dogs purple, and I spent the first week of it saying things like “ooh, is that a special kind of dog?” She stopped bringing them to me. That was the whole lesson.

The moment colouring becomes a thing to get right, it stops being the thing that keeps them quiet for forty minutes. Nobody’s afternoon has ever been improved by an adult pointing out that sharks aren’t orange. Say you like it and leave it there, or say nothing at all and go and top your tea up.

If you’re printing a lot of these, the ink saving advice is worth five minutes. Outlines on white paper are the cheapest thing on this site to print, and there is no reason to run them at photo quality.

Colouring alongside them

If you sit down with a child to colour, use your own copy of the sheet and keep to your own choices. If they ask what colour to use, offer two options rather than a suggestion, so the decision stays with them. Children who colour with an adult nearby often finish more pages, and they tend to try more colours when they see that nobody is checking them.

What to do with the finished ones

Put the best ones up, on the fridge or on a board, and let your child decide which ones go up and which ones go in the bin. Keeping a folder of finished pages is useful for a few years, and it becomes a small record of how their colouring changed. Older children often like to look back at their early pages, so it’s worth keeping a few.

Pages for older children

From about eight, many children enjoy choosing their own colour scheme on the busier pages, and some enjoy using fine pens or pencils for the detail. Let them plan the colours on a scrap sheet first, if they want to. The goal at this age is usually a finished page they’re proud of, so the sheet is best left as a quiet project rather than a race.