Big Shapes Coloring Pages
17 printable pages. Twelve pictures with thick outlines filling the sheet, then four petal patterns for an older child. Nothing small enough to be frustrating.
- Pages
- 17
- Ages
- 2-6
- Paper size
- A4
- Black ink only
Free to print at home, at school, and in a classroom of thirty.
Twelve pictures and four petal patterns, one per page, thick outlines
Toddler coloring pages fail for one reason, and it is not the subject. The lines are too thin and the spaces are too small for a fist holding a crayon. A two-year-old given a detailed picture scribbles across it, which is not a failure of the child.
What is in it
Twelve pictures: a sun, a house, a flower, a fish, an apple, a tree, a sailboat, a rocket, a balloon, a butterfly, a star and a kite. Each fills most of an A4 sheet and is drawn with a thick outline.
Four petal patterns at the back — three, eight, five and twelve petals — for a child who has outgrown the pictures and wants something with more spaces in it.
Only the lines that are needed
Each picture carries the few interior lines that make it readable and nothing else: an eye and two fin lines on the fish, a round window on the rocket, a door and two windows on the house. There is no shading, no texture and no detail small enough to be missed by a crayon.
Ink
Outlines only, no filled areas anywhere. A coloring page with a solid black border is a page a school will not print twenty copies of, and the whole point of a free printable is that it can be printed twenty times.
What to color with, by age
Chunky crayons at two, thin crayons or thick pencils at three, and felt pens from about four — with 100 gsm paper, because felt pens go through 80 gsm and ruin the next sheet. Paint works on any of these pages; the spaces are large enough for a brush.
What comes next
Shape Tracing uses the same outlines at a smaller size and asks a child to draw them, and Color Words Tracing pairs coloring with reading the name of the color.
Printing this one correctly
In your printer dialog set Scale to 100% or Actual size, not Fit to page. Fit to page shrinks the tracing letters and they stop matching the size a child's hand is learning.
Plain paper is fine for crayons and pencils. If your child uses felt pens, 100 gsm paper stops the ink bleeding to the next sheet.
