Sleepy Crescent Moon Colouring Page

This page is one large crescent moon, curved like a fingernail, taking up most of the sheet. Its face is simple: two closed, sleepy eyes drawn as soft U-shapes, a small curved smile, and two round circle cheeks sitting just below. Around the moon float four five-pointed stars, spaced well apart in the corners and along the right-hand side, each drawn as a plain outline with nothing inside.

The moon itself is one wide, unbroken shape, so a child can colour the whole body in a single sweep without worrying about staying inside lots of small lines. The face pieces are a different matter, the eyes, cheeks and smile are small and sit close together, which asks for a steadier hand and a finer crayon or pencil tip if they want to keep the marks neat. The stars give a second, separate job of the same easy kind, each one an isolated shape a child can pick a fresh colour for, which is a natural point to talk about how many stars are out and whether the moon is asleep because it is night-time.

Because the big shapes and the fiddly face details sit side by side on the same page, this suits a fairly wide range of hands. A two or three-year-old can happily fill in the moon and stars with fat crayons and skip the face, while a four or five-year-old is more likely to have a go at the smaller details too. It is a calm, quiet-time sheet rather than a busy one, good for winding down before bed.