When we first had kids I fell into that mindset of buying colouring books and they were never used and then I would see another one in the store and think “Wow this is the one!” and buy that and guess what 1 picture coloured in and that was that.  That was when I started searching on-line for pictures and it  is still what I use 90% of the time.

Using websites to download and print colouring pictures means the kids can choose pictures / topics that they are interested in and when we find a set that they really love we can print them out multiples times and the kids can do as many different versions as they want.  When the kids were younger they both loved this animal pack of colouring pages from Twinkl Resources (Free to download), I printed certain pages from that pack sooooooo many times – they would colour them in over and over again, paint them or use them for collages.

And that is the beauty of being able to print the colouring pages out, the kids are not restricted by how often they try something new on a page.  They know they can retry the same picture over and over again until the get the result that they want so they can get a bit creative and have some fun.  Like my son’s blue elephant in a sandstorm

I printed out multiple copies of the Elephant colouring page from Activity Village for him and he created all different kinds of elephants and different backgrounds and then combined them together.  He knew he was not restricted to just one copy so he had some fun and experimented.

And my daughter’s felt tip pen and water picture.  I don’t think she would have been so brave as to try “painting over the felt-tip pens with water” unless she knew I could reprint another copy of the picture if it went horribly wrong (when we first tried adding water to her felt-tip pen pictures she was very uncertain they would work).  The picture below is part of the Peter Rabbit set from Twinkl Resources.

And of course there are so many other uses from colouring pages.  We used a peacock colouring page to create a times table poster , butterfly colouring page to introduce doubling and halving and they are perfect for window art / suncatchers.

Personally I like the freedom that downloading colouring pages gives us, we can print them as often as we want, we can print them onto card for crafts or even used them in maths lessons.  And really importantly for me it gives the kids that extra courage to know that they can try a page more than once.  If they don’t get the picture exactly how the want, we just reprint and have another go, for me that is important because I want the kids to experiment with art and colour and not be scared of making mistakes.

The stunning flower wreath above is from the Mrs Mactivity site – MrsMactivity Spring fun.