Free Rain Coloring Pages

Rain is the weather children know best from the inside of a window. It drums on the roof, runs down the glass in wiggly lines and leaves puddles that are impossible to walk past in a pair of boots. It is also the reason for umbrellas, raincoats, wellies and the smell of wet grass, and the reason a walk turns into a splash. That makes rainy day coloring pages a good fit for the days when everyone is stuck indoors, and a rain coloring page gives a child something cheerful to do with the weather they are watching outside. The eight sheets here turn rain into friendly characters: raindrops with faces, clouds with arms and legs, and a child dressed for a downpour. Real rain has no colour at all; it is clear water, and it only looks grey because of the cloud behind it. That leaves children free to choose. Light blue raindrops and grey clouds are the classic picture, a yellow raincoat and red boots are the traditional rainy-day outfit, and a puddle of purple drops or a pink cloud is just as welcome. What makes a picture read as rain is one simple shape: the teardrop, round at the bottom and coming to a point at the top. Next to it sits the cloud, a row of round bumps with a flatter edge underneath, and almost every sheet here uses one or both. The eight designs get steadily harder. First is a single big raindrop with a face, waving one hand in the air and walking along in big shoes, drawn in the thickest outlines of the set with one long shine stripe down its side, so there is one large space to fill and it suits toddlers still learning to stay inside the lines. Next is a shy cloud bowing forward and hugging its tummy, its eyes closed in happy arcs, standing on two thin legs and wearing a little round rain hat that has a smiling face and a raindrop of its own. The third sheet is a laughing cloud with both arms thrown up in the air, standing on long legs while raindrops fall around its head and small puffs of cloud and curls of wind float above it. The fourth is a character with a cloud for a head and a fat raindrop for a body, dotted with smaller drops, standing with its puffy fists on its hips under a pointed drop-shaped hat. After that the drawings add more to do: a big smiling cloud sitting cross-legged on a fluffy cloud cushion, holding a tummy patterned with five raindrops; a child with puffy cloud-shaped hair splashed with raindrops, leaping in the air with arms and legs flung wide, sparkles and motion lines all around; a smiling cloud with sparkly eyes and arms spread wide, wearing a little raincoat with a bow and two buttons and a pair of rain boots, surrounded by three smiling raindrops and a shower of smaller ones; and finally a head-and-shoulders portrait of a smiling girl in a hooded raincoat fastened with a toggle, her wavy hair decorated with raindrops, a little cloud and stars, for children who like a long, careful page. The detail worth pausing on is the raindrop itself. Every cartoon raindrop on these pages, and in nearly every picture book, is drawn as a teardrop, but real raindrops are never that shape. Small drops are almost perfectly round, because the water pulls itself into a tiny ball. Bigger drops get pushed flat underneath by the air as they fall, so they look more like the top half of a burger bun, and the biggest ones stretch until they break apart into smaller drops. It makes a good question while colouring: if a raindrop is not pointy, why do we draw it that way? Where the rain comes from is the other half of the lesson. Inside a cloud, billions of tiny droplets bump into each other and join up until they are too heavy to float, and then they fall, which is why the cloud coloring pages, with their own rain cloud dropping raindrops, sit naturally next to these. A clean jar on a windowsill or in the garden makes a simple rain gauge: children can measure with a ruler how much rain fell overnight and colour a sheet for every rainy day of the week. Every sheet prints on landscape US Letter paper at 200 DPI, so the whole picture fits on the page with a clean margin. 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 cross-legged cloud, the raincoat cloud with its shower of small drops and the girl in the hooded raincoat, where the overlapping legs, the little raindrops and the strands of hair put the lines closest together. In the classroom these pages pair well with a lesson on weather, the water cycle, spring showers, a weather chart for the classroom wall, or the letter R. The printable weather pages fill in the rest of that chart, with a sunny day, a thunderstorm, a snow cloud and a windy one to sit beside the rain, and for the stormiest spring days, when wind and rain arrive together, there are twister coloring pages too. When the sun comes out during a shower and shines on the falling drops, you get a rainbow, so a few of the rainbow coloring pages make the perfect end to a rainy-day display. On a cold enough day the same clouds send down snow instead, and the snowflake sheets turn a rain lesson into a winter one. Rain is also what makes things grow, and the vegetable beds and flowers on the printable garden are a good way to show where all that water goes. In a tropical rainforest it rains on most days of the year, which is why the leaves on the rainforest sheets grow so big. Some animals love a wet day: many frogs come out to call after a heavy shower, which makes the frog coloring pages a natural partner, and ducks stay dry because they spread a waterproof oil over their feathers, the reason for the saying "like water off a duck's back" and a good excuse to colour a printable duck. The sun, the moon, the flowers and the trees are in the nature coloring pages.