Free Cow Coloring Pages

Cows are farm animals that people have kept for thousands of years, mostly for milk, and also for beef and leather. A grown dairy cow weighs about 1,400 pounds and spends most of her day eating grass, resting, and chewing cud. Children meet cows on farm visits, in picture books, and in the letter C posters that hang in preschool classrooms, which makes a cow page one of the easiest animals to sit down with. The coat is the fun part, and there is no single "right" cow. Holstein dairy cows are the classic black-and-white patches. Jerseys are warm brown, Highland cows of Scotland are ginger or honey with a long shaggy coat, and Brahman cattle — the ones with a hump on the shoulders — are usually pale grey or cream. Children can copy a breed they know or invent a rainbow cow. Point out the pink nose and the udder, which stay pale on almost every real cow. The eight designs get steadily harder. The first three are the easy ones: a chunky sitting calf with big round eyes, a spotted cow lying down with its eyes closed, and a playful cow leaping and kicking. Thick outlines and wide open shapes suit toddlers and preschoolers still learning to stay inside the lines. Next is a close-up smiling face with ear tags and eyelashes, then a spotted cow looking over its shoulder. The last three step up: a dairy cow standing in profile with large patches, a Brahman with a shoulder hump and folded neck, and a fluffy Highland calf whose coat is covered in shaggy fur for children who like a long, careful project. Every sheet prints on landscape US Letter paper at 200 DPI, so the cow fills the page without being cut off. Plain copier paper is fine for crayons and colored pencils. If you are using markers or paint, slightly thicker card stock stops the color bleeding through — worth doing on the Highland calf, where the fur lines sit close together. In the classroom these pages pair well with a lesson on farm animals, on where milk comes from, or on the letter C. The sitting calf and the standing dairy cow side by side make a good baby-and-grown-up comparison. Print two or three different designs and let each child pick: the sitting calf is finished in a few minutes, while the Highland calf can fill a whole quiet afternoon, which keeps a mixed-age table busy at the same time. The cattle pages have more bulls and calves, the pig sheets sit next door in the barn, the llama pages add a woolly pack animal, and the full list of animals includes the wild ones. The lying-down cow also makes a good calm-down activity, and the simple sitting outline is open enough that younger children can add grass, a barn or a sun around the cow if they want to.