Free Puppy Coloring Pages

A puppy is a baby dog, usually under a year old. Newborn puppies cannot see or hear, and they spend their first weeks drinking milk and sleeping in a pile with their brothers and sisters. By about eight weeks they are tumbling, chewing and chasing anything that moves, which is why children find them so easy to love — most kids have already met a puppy, even if they have never had one at home. Puppy coats come in more colours than almost any other pet, so nobody can color one of these pages "wrong". Honey gold, black, white, brown, grey, black-and-tan, or white with spots are all real. Point out the black of the nose and paw pads, and the pale chest and belly that stay light on many puppies. The spotted standing puppy on sheet six is the natural one for a Dalmatian coat, and the fluffy sitting puppy is a good match for a golden retriever. The eight designs are deliberately different from one another. The first three are the easy ones: a simple sitting puppy with floppy ears and a collar, a cartoon puppy sitting and waving one paw, and a short-legged puppy in a play-bow with its front paws stretched forward. 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 fluffy puppy rolling on its back with its paws in the air, a fluffy puppy sitting facing forward, and a standing puppy covered in round spots. The last two are the longer projects: a puppy in a sniffing play-bow with more realistic fur and muscle lines, and a sleeping wrinkly puppy whose folded face and compact body are drawn in close, careful lines. Every sheet prints on landscape US Letter paper at 200 DPI, so the puppy 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 wrinkles and fur 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 P. The sitting, play-bow, rolling and sleeping poses are four real puppy behaviours children can act out before they color them. Print two or three different designs and let each child pick: the sitting puppy with a collar is finished in a few minutes, while the wrinkly sleeper can fill a whole quiet afternoon, which keeps a mixed-age table busy at the same time. The dog pages are the grown-up version of the same animal and the kitten sheets make a natural pair; the animal coloring set has more. The collar on sheet one is a useful extra — children can color the band and invent a name for their puppy — and the spotted standing puppy works as a counting activity, with children filling a set number of spots in one colour and the rest in another.