Free Moose Coloring Pages

Moose are the largest members of the deer family. They live in the northern forests of North America, Scandinavia and Russia — around lakes, bogs and willow thickets — and they are one of the few huge wild animals a family in Canada or Alaska might actually see from the road. Children usually notice the antlers first, those wide paddle-shaped racks that look nothing like a deer's branching ones, which is why a moose page is such a satisfying one to colour. A real moose is dark brown, almost black-brown, with paler grey-brown legs that look as if it is wearing stockings, a humped shoulder and a long drooping muzzle. That is a perfectly good way to colour these sheets. It is also fine to ignore it. A ginger moose, a snowy one, or a rainbow one is just as welcome. Point out the palmate antlers — the wide palm with finger-like tines around the edge — and the bell, the flap of skin that hangs under the chin. Those two shapes are what make it a moose rather than a deer. The eight designs get steadily harder. First is a chubby moose calf sitting on its haunches with big ears and no antlers, thick outlines and wide open shapes that suit toddlers still learning to stay inside the lines. Then a smiling moose face with simple paddle antlers, a moose standing front-on looking at you, and one lying down with its legs tucked under, all still bold and friendly. After that the drawings become more realistic: a cow moose grazing with her head down and no antlers, a bull glancing back over his shoulder, one walking with a front hoof raised, and a side-on standing bull whose big palmate antlers take a little more patience. Antlers are the part worth pausing on. Only male moose grow them, they are made of bone, and they fall off and grow back bigger every year. Unlike a deer's, they are palmate — shaped like an open hand with a broad palm and points around the rim. Count the points on the standing-profile sheet together, then compare them with the calf, who has none at all, and the grazing cow, who will never grow any. The same family at different ages, which children find genuinely surprising. Every sheet prints on landscape US Letter paper at 200 DPI, so the moose 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 woodland and northern forests, on the deer family (moose, deer, elk), on the letter M, or on how antlers differ from horns. Print a moose next to a deer page and let children spot which animal has paddle antlers and which has branching ones. The sitting calf is finished in a few minutes; the standing profile can fill a quiet stretch of the afternoon. Print a few different designs and let each child pick the one that matches their patience that day. The deer pages show the smaller members of the same family, and the more animal printables has the rest.