Free Sunflower Coloring Pages

Sunflowers are tall summer plants that first grew wild in North America, where Native American farmers were planting them for their seeds thousands of years ago. Today they fill fields, school gardens and back fences around the world, and a child who has grown one from a seed in a paper cup knows how quickly it shoots up past their head. The big round face and ring of petals is one of the first flowers children learn to draw, which makes a sunflower page an easy one to hand over at almost any age. A real sunflower has bright yellow or golden petals around a brown or dark purple middle, on a thick green stem with large, rough, heart-shaped leaves. Some garden kinds are red, orange, bronze or pale lemon. That is a perfectly good way to color these sheets. It is also fine to ignore it. A pink sunflower, a blue one or one with every petal a different colour is just as welcome. The shapes worth pointing out are the big round seed head in the middle, the ring of pointed petals around it, and the leaves standing out from the stem — those are what make a sunflower look like a sunflower rather than a daisy. The eight designs get steadily harder. First is a cartoon sunflower with a smiling face, round eyes and blushing cheeks filling the whole middle, two leafy arms held out to the sides and two leaves lower down, all in thick outlines that suit toddlers still learning to stay inside the lines. Then a sunflower with one ring of rounded petals and a big round centre marked with curved lines, dots and little circles, and a bold sunflower whose seed head is divided into a net of large squares, easy to fill one at a time. The fourth sheet shows the whole plant: a small flower head on a tall stem with six heart-shaped leaves, tufts of grass and pebbles at its feet. After that the drawings add more to do: a sunflower with its head tilted to one side on a curving stem, a bloom seen from slightly below so the seed head becomes a criss-cross oval, a playful sunflower whose petals curl and wave like flames around a middle full of loops, and finally a big front-facing bloom with two rings of petals and a seed head packed with hundreds of tiny round seeds, for children who like a long, careful page. The middle of the sunflower is the detail worth pausing on. It looks like one big circle, but it is made of hundreds of tiny flowers, sometimes more than a thousand, and each one can become a seed. Even the yellow "petals" round the edge are separate little flowers. A daisy is built exactly the same way, only smaller, and the printable daisies make an easy side-by-side comparison. The last sheet shows how tightly the seeds pack together, and older children can look for the curved rows that spiral out from the centre in two directions; on real sunflowers the number of spirals is often 34 one way and 55 the other. The tall-plant sheet is a good one for talking about how young sunflowers turn to follow the sun across the sky during the day, and a smiling sun to color makes a good partner for it. Every sheet prints on landscape US Letter paper at 200 DPI, so the sunflower 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 angled-view, wavy-petal and packed-seed-head sheets, where the cross-hatching, the curls and the little seeds put the lines closest together. In the classroom these pages pair well with a lesson on plant parts and seeds, on summer and growing things, on measuring how tall something grows, or on the letter S. Print the cartoon sunflower next to the packed seed head and let children spot what the cartoon leaves out, or plant real seeds and color the tall-plant sheet while they wait — the seedling on the plant page shows what will come up first. A sunflower can grow taller than a grown-up in a single summer and then die back in autumn, while the pine, willow and oak on the tree sheets take years to grow and keep getting bigger for decades, which makes a good comparison for the measuring lesson. The flower coloring pages put a sunflower beside a daisy, a tulip and an orchid, the rose sheets are a good contrast for a garden lesson, the hibiscus pages swap the summer field for a tropical garden, a bee page shows one of the insects that carry pollen between sunflower heads, and a parrot is one of the many birds that crack open sunflower seeds to eat. The color-by-number math generator makes a practice sheet to go with it, and the trees, skies and landscapes are in the rest of the nature coloring pages.