Free Earth Coloring Pages

Earth is our home planet, the third planet from the sun and the only place we know of where anything lives. Every mountain, forest, ocean and city a child has ever seen sits somewhere on its surface, which is what makes a coloring page of planet Earth feel so big: one circle holds the whole world. Children meet the round, blue-and-green Earth on globes, in picture books about space and on posters every April for Earth Day, and colouring one is a gentle first step into geography. Every sheet here shows the planet as a globe, turned to show a different side of the world, from a cheerful face smiling out of Africa to the wide Pacific Ocean dotted with islands. Seen from space, Earth is mostly blue, because water covers about 71 percent of its surface. The land is green where forests and grass grow, brown and yellow in the deserts, and white at the poles, where Antarctica and the Arctic are covered in ice, and swirls of white cloud drift over all of it. Blue for the sea and green for the land is the classic way to colour an Earth coloring page, and white for Antarctica and Greenland is a nice extra. It is just as fine to make the oceans purple and the continents every colour of the rainbow. Two things make the picture read as the Earth: a big round outline, and the shapes of the continents inside it. Africa, with its wide top and narrow southern tip, and South America, shaped like a long triangle pointing down, are the easiest to spot, and they appear on most of these sheets. The eight designs get steadily harder. First is a smiling globe: two round eyes and a happy smile sit right on the Sahara in the north of Africa, with Europe above, South America on the left and a sliver of Antarctica along the bottom, leaving huge spaces of ocean to colour. Next is a globe drawn in bold outlines that shows the Americas on the left and Europe and Africa on the right, with Greenland at the top and Antarctica running along the bottom edge. The third sheet turns the globe so the Americas fill the left side, with the ragged islands of northern Canada, the Great Lakes and the Caribbean islands, and only the edges of Europe and Africa showing across the Atlantic. The fourth turns it the other way to show Europe, Africa and Asia, with Arabia, India and the island of Madagascar, and a thin line drawn round the middle for the equator. After that the drawings add more to do: a large globe that fills almost the whole page, showing the Atlantic side of the world with more small Arctic islands; a view of the Pacific Ocean, with the coast of Asia and Japan on the left, Alaska and North America on the right, Australia and New Zealand at the bottom and long chains of tiny dotted islands scattered across the open sea; a cartoon Earth in thick lines with a smiling face over the Atlantic, little clouds, curly waves in the oceans, and mountains, pine trees and rivers drawn on the land; and finally a globe criss-crossed with lines of latitude and longitude, with small waves on the sea and a penguin standing on Antarctica, for children who like a long, careful page. The detail worth pausing on is that each sheet shows only half the planet. A ball can only ever show one side at a time, so the Pacific sheet and the Africa sheet look like two different worlds, but they are two sides of the same Earth, and laying them side by side is a good way to explain why a flat map stretches the shapes. The equator on the fourth sheet splits the planet into the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, and the grid lines on the last one are the lines map makers use to give every place on Earth an address. The planet is also always moving. It spins once a day, so the half facing the sun has daytime while the other half has night, and that is the real reason the sun seems to rise and set. It also travels all the way round the sun once a year, while the moon circles the Earth about once a month. A torch and a ball, or a child walking slowly round a lamp, shows both. Seven continents and five oceans share the surface: Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America and South America, and the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Southern and Arctic Oceans. The Pacific sheet shows just how big that biggest ocean is, and the penguin on the last sheet is a reminder that wild penguins live in the southern half of the world, a long way from polar bears. Every sheet prints on landscape US Letter paper at 200 DPI, so the globe 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. It is worth doing on the Pacific sheet, the cartoon globe and the grid-line globe, where the tiny island dots, the clouds and waves, and the criss-crossing lines put the lines closest together. In the classroom these pages pair well with a lesson on continents and oceans, day and night, the solar system, maps and globes, or the letter E. Earth Day falls on 22 April each year, and a coloring page for Earth is an easy way to start talking about looking after the planet: picking up litter, saving water, turning off lights and planting trees. For an Earth Day display, hang the globes beside rainforest coloring pages, since rainforests are home to a huge share of the world's plants and animals, and the mountain sheets for the high places that rise above the land, the tallest of them Mount Everest. In space, the sun, the moon and a sky of printable stars complete a solar system display. For the penguin on the last sheet, the penguin coloring pages have plenty more, and the countries drawn across the globe each have their own flag on the flag coloring pages. The flowers, skies and the rest of the outdoors are in the nature coloring pages.