Free Koala Coloring Pages

Koalas are marsupials that live in the eucalyptus forests of eastern Australia. They are not bears, even though people still call them "koala bears" — they carry their babies in a pouch, like kangaroos, and spend almost their whole lives up in the trees. Children usually meet them as the sleepy grey face in a picture book, which is why they are such an easy animal to sit down and colour. The real coat is grey or grey-brown, with a paler cream chest and belly and a large black or dark-brown nose. That is a perfectly good way to colour these sheets. It is also fine to ignore it. A pink koala, a rainbow one, or one with a bright green eucalyptus tint is just as welcome. The round fluffy ears and the big leathery nose are the parts that make it look like a koala rather than a teddy, so those are worth pointing out. The eight designs get steadily harder. First is a koala curled up asleep in a round ball — thick outlines and a huge empty body, right for toddlers still learning to stay inside the lines. Then a koala sitting in side profile with a paw at its chin, a cute one hugging its knees, and a sitting koala waving one paw, all still bold and friendly. After that the poses open up: a koala standing with both arms stretched wide, a baby crawling on all fours, a koala stretching and yawning with its mouth wide open, and finally a close-up face with whiskers, eyelashes and fluffy ear texture for children who like a longer, careful page. Sleep is the part worth pausing on. Koalas can doze for 18 to 22 hours a day, because eucalyptus leaves give them so little energy. The curled-up sleeping sheet and the yawning stretch are natural ones to talk about while colouring — ask whether the koala is just waking up or heading back to sleep in a fork of the tree. Every sheet prints on landscape US Letter paper at 200 DPI, so the koala 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 colour bleeding through — worth doing on the face portrait, where the fur lines sit close together. In the classroom these pages pair well with a lesson on Australian wildlife, on marsupials (a koala next to a kangaroo is a memorable pair), on trees and what lives in them, or on the letter K. Print a few different designs and let each child pick: the sleeping koala is finished in a few minutes, while the detailed face can fill a whole quiet afternoon, which keeps a mixed-age table busy at the same time. The sloth pages show another slow tree-dweller from the other side of the world, and the animal pages we offer cover the rest.