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Fall Coloring Pages

Fall is the season a small child notices without being told about it. The leaves change color on the walk to preschool, acorns and buckeyes start turning up in coat pockets, and the squirrels get visibly busier. These pages are that walk, drawn to be colored in.

The color choices are what make this set worth printing. Almost everything else on this site is a thing that is one color — a red apple, a yellow sun — and a child who has started worrying about getting it right will ask you what color to use. A fall leaf can be green, yellow, orange, red or all four at once, and none of those is wrong. That is unusually freeing, and it is worth saying out loud to a child who needs to hear it.

There is deliberate overlap with the Halloween pages, because a pumpkin belongs to both. The difference is tone. These are the harvest and the woodland rather than the costumes and the dark, so they are the ones to reach for in the six weeks before Halloween arrives and the six after it has gone.

Demand builds from the start of September and holds until the last week of November. These pages stay up all year.

38 pages

Which of these suits my child?

Two year olds
One large leaf, one pumpkin, one acorn — a single shape filling most of the page. A leaf is the best possible first coloring subject: it is a closed outline with nothing inside it to stay out of, so almost any mark a two year old makes lands somewhere that counts as right.
Three year olds
Leaves with veins drawn in, a squirrel with a separate tail, a hedgehog with a face and a back. These have two or three regions that plainly want different treatment, which is the step up from filling everything with one color.
Four and five year olds
The woodland scenes with several animals, and the leaf pages detailed enough to color vein by vein. A four year old who has been told a leaf can be more than one color will often produce the most interesting page they have made all year.

Every sheet lists the ages it suits, and the 2, 3, 4 and 5 year old pages carry the full range if you would rather start there.

Getting the most out of them

Collect first, color after
Bring back three leaves from a walk, put them on the table next to the sheet, and let your child match the colors rather than invent them. It turns a coloring page into looking closely at something real, and it is the one time of year the material is free and lying on the ground.
The multi-color leaf
Show a child once that they can start a leaf in yellow and run it into orange and red toward the edge, and they will do it on every leaf afterwards. It is the earliest version of blending, it needs no special pencils, and it looks far better than it has any right to.
They make good window displays
Cut-out leaves taped along a window are the cheapest seasonal decoration there is, they take two weeks of coloring to accumulate, and cutting around a leaf outline is genuine scissor practice — the curves are gentle enough to succeed at and irregular enough to require looking.

The printing guide covers the scale setting that decides whether a sheet comes out the size it was drawn at, and most of these can also be colored on screen if the printer is out of ink.

Other seasons