Free Kitten Coloring Pages

A kitten is a baby cat, usually under a year old. Newborn kittens cannot see or walk, and they spend their first weeks drinking milk and sleeping in a pile with their brothers and sisters. By about two months they are tumbling, pouncing and chasing anything that moves, which is why children find them so easy to love — most kids have already seen a kitten play, even if they have never had one at home. Kitten coats come in the same colours as grown cats, so nobody can color one of these pages "wrong". Ginger, grey, cream, black, white, or the patchwork of a calico are all real. All kittens are born with blue eyes, and the adult colour — green, gold or copper — only shows up later, so a blue-eyed kitten is always a fair choice. Point out the pink triangle of the nose, the pads under the toes, and the pale chin and belly that stay light on many kittens. The pouncing kitten on sheet seven has stripes on its legs, so it is the natural one for a ginger or grey tabby. The eight designs are deliberately different from one another. The first three are the easy ones: a kitten curled into a sleeping circle, a simple stretching kitten with its front paws reaching forward, and a sitting kitten wearing a collar with a round tag. They use thick outlines and big open shapes that suit toddlers and preschoolers still learning to stay inside the lines. Sheets four to six sit in the middle — a chubby fold-eared kitten sitting front-on, a kitten waving one paw in the air, and a kitten rolling on its back with its paw pads showing. The last two are the longer projects: a playful kitten crouched to pounce with striped legs and a fluffy raised tail, and a long-haired kitten sitting front-on whose chest fur and plumed tail are drawn as lots of separate strands. Every sheet prints on landscape US Letter paper at 200 DPI, so the kitten 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 last two sheets, where the fur strands sit close together and can run into each other on flimsy paper. In the classroom these pages pair well with a lesson on pets and how to care for them, on baby and grown-up animals, or on the letter K. The sleeping, stretching and pouncing poses are three real kitten behaviours children can act out before they color them. Print two or three different designs and let each child pick: the sleeping kitten is finished in a few minutes, while the long-haired kitten can fill a whole quiet afternoon, which keeps a mixed-age table busy at the same time. The cat pages are the grown-up version of the same animal and the puppy sheets make a natural companion; the whole animal series has more. The sleeping kitten also makes a good calm-down activity at the end of a busy day, and the collar on sheet three is a useful extra — children can color the tag and invent a name for their kitten.