Free Weather Coloring Pages

Weather is what the sky and the air are doing right now: sunny, cloudy, rainy, windy, snowy or stormy. Children notice it long before they have a word for it, because it decides whether they need a coat, boots or sun cream and whether playtime happens outside. It is also on the wall of almost every early-years classroom as a weather chart, where someone gets to look out of the window each morning and say what the day is like. These sheets gather the whole sky onto one page: rain, a rainbow, a thunderstorm, sunshine and cloud, snow, a clear night, the four seasons and a windy day, nearly all of them with friendly faces. Weather has no single colour, which is half the fun. Most children give the sun yellow and orange, a storm cloud grey or dark purple with a bright yellow lightning bolt, the rain blue, and the autumn leaves red, orange, gold and brown. Snowflakes are white, so colouring the sky behind them pale blue is a good trick to make them show up. The rainbow on the second sheet has five bands rather than the seven colours of a real rainbow (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet), so children can choose which to keep. Any colour is welcome, though, and a pink rain cloud or a green sun is just as good a page. The shape that makes almost all of these read as weather is the puffy, bumpy outline of a cloud, which turns up on seven of the eight sheets, and what falls out of it: teardrop raindrops, six-armed snowflakes or a zigzag bolt of lightning. The eight designs get steadily harder. First is a smiling rain cloud with its eyes squeezed shut, oval rosy cheeks and a wide grin, with nine plain raindrops falling beneath it in rows of four, three and two, so there are only a few big spaces and it suits toddlers. Second is a rainbow with no face at all: a broad five-stripe arch whose two ends rest on puffy clouds. The third sheet is a stormy cloud with slanting eyebrows and a cheeky sideways smile, a single thick zigzag lightning bolt shooting out underneath. The fourth is a partly sunny day, a smiling sun with pointed rays and big shiny eyes sitting right beside a smiling cloud, both with round cheeks to colour pink. After that the drawings add more to do: a grinning snow cloud with fifteen small snowflakes falling below it, each one drawn a little differently; a clear night, with a crescent moon in a nightcap fast asleep inside a ring of dozens of little stars; a weather wheel for the four seasons, with a smiling sun, a cloud dropping rain and lightning, a veined maple leaf and a big snowflake with a star at its centre placed around a circle; and finally a windy day, a cloud with puffed-out cheeks blowing a long gust of curling, swirling wind lines with oak, maple and other leaves tumbling along inside it, for children who like a long, careful page. The storm sheet is the one worth pausing on. Lightning is a giant spark of electricity, and it heats the air around it so fast that the air bursts outwards with a bang, which is the thunder. Light travels much faster than sound, so you see the flash first. Counting the seconds between the flash and the thunder, then dividing by three, gives roughly how many kilometres away the storm is (divide by five for miles), and children love counting out loud during a real storm. The rule that goes with it is a simple one: when thunder roars, go indoors. The very biggest thunderstorms can also spin up a tornado, and the tornado coloring pages carry the storm lesson on, with a calm, simple plan for staying safe. The clear-night sheet has its own small surprise. A night with no clouds is usually colder than a cloudy one, because clouds act like a blanket that holds in the warmth of the day, which is why frost so often follows a clear, starry night. Every sheet prints on landscape US Letter paper at 200 DPI, so the picture 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 snow-cloud, clear-night and windy-day sheets, where the small snowflakes, the ring of tiny stars and the swirling wind lines put the lines closest together, and on the seasons wheel for the veins of the maple leaf. In the classroom these pages are made for a "What's the weather today?" routine. Print a set, colour them together, and each morning let one child choose the sheet that matches the sky and pin it to the weather chart. Keep a row for each school day and it becomes a weather chart for the week, which ties in neatly with the days of the week coloring pages. At the end of the month, count up the sunny, rainy and cloudy days and turn them into a bar chart with the graph maker. The pages also suit a lesson on the seasons, the water cycle, staying safe in a storm, or the letter W. For a closer look at each kind of day, the sun coloring pages cover the sunshine, the cloud sheets and the printable rain cover the grey days, the rainbow coloring pages catch the moment the sun comes out in a shower, and the snowflake sheets cover the coldest days of winter. The windy-day sheet, with its falling autumn leaves, fits the time of year when many geese gather and fly south in long V-shaped lines, so a printable goose makes a good partner. The flowers, trees and the rest of the sky are in the nature coloring pages.