American Flag Coloring Pages

The American flag is rarely alone in a picture. It hangs from porches, flies over fire stations and ballparks, rides on boats and bicycles, and gets waved from the curb on parade day. These American flag coloring pages show it the way people actually see it, in the places it belongs.

The flag on its own: flying from a tall pole on a lawn with the rope tied off at the cleat, rippling high against the clouds, hanging from a porch ceiling, folded into a triangle on a wooden table, and held up in one hand on a small stick. The bald eagle joins it, perched on a branch in front of the flag and again spreading its wings wide before it.

Then the country it flies over. A flag on the front of a barn above the hay bales, a mailbox by a country lane, a farm gate beside a cornfield, a pickup truck loaded with watermelons, a town square with a fountain, a schoolhouse with a bell tower, a fire station with its truck out front, a lighthouse on a rocky point, a boat at its mooring, a fishing boat with gulls overhead, a jetty with a windsock, a stadium under the floodlights. The front porch appears more than once, with rocking chairs, with a wicker chair at dusk, with a pair of boots and a hat on the step.

The celebrations are here too: Fourth of July fireworks over the flag, a picnic table with lemonade, a lattice pie, cherries and corn, drummers and a sousaphone player marching past waving crowds, bunting strung over a campsite, a baseball glove on a bench. And for a steadier hand, a wreath of stars and stripes on a front door, a quilt on a bed, a shield in a laurel wreath and a mandala of stars.

What the stars and stripes stand for

The flag has thirteen stripes, seven red and six white, one for each of the original colonies, with red at the top and at the bottom. The fifty stars stand for the fifty states, and the blue rectangle that holds them is called the union or the canton. The design has changed as states joined: the fifty-star version has flown since July 4, 1960, the year after Hawaii became a state. The story usually told is that it was sketched as a school project by a high school student in Ohio, who got a B minus for it.

Flag Day is June 14, the anniversary of the day in 1777 when the Continental Congress first described a flag of thirteen stripes and thirteen stars. The flag's nicknames, Old Glory and the Star-Spangled Banner, come from a sea captain's flag and from the poem that became the national anthem.

How to color the flag so it looks right

Start with the red stripes, top and bottom first, then every other one in between; the white stripes stay as bare paper. The blue field is the careful part, because the stars need to stay white. Go around each star with the tip of a blue pencil first, then fill the space between them. A child who finds that fiddly can color the whole field blue with a light hand and then go over the stars with a white crayon, which is not perfect but reads as a flag from across the room.

The small flags in the scenes are drawn loosely, a few stripes and a scatter of stars, the way they look from a distance. A child who wants a precise flag should color the full-page ones, or keep a photo of the real flag nearby and count along.

Showing the flag the proper way

These pages also teach something useful. The U.S. Flag Code says that when the flag hangs vertically, on a wall or from a porch, the union goes at the top, to the viewer's left, which is how it hangs on the porch page here. It is never flown with the union at the bottom except as a signal of distress.

The folded triangle has its own meaning. At a military funeral the flag is folded thirteen times into that shape, with only the blue field and its stars showing, and presented to the family. For a child with a grandparent who served, the folded flag or the flag on the porch is a respectful page to color for Veterans Day or Memorial Day, and a good way to start that conversation.

Pages for young children and older ones

Most of this collection is detailed: the flag rarely flies over empty space here, and porches, parades, barns and boats bring plenty of boards, windows and people with them. Those pages suit an older child or an adult who wants a long, careful page. Lots of detail, above the grid, opens on the busiest:

• Front porch with an American flag
• Pickup truck with watermelons and a flag
• American flag over a town square

For a younger child, a few pages keep the flag large and the background light. Quick to color gathers them:

• Hand waving a small American flag
• American flag rippling in the wind
• American flag on a lawn flagpole

Fourth of July crafts from a finished page

On the Fourth of July, a colored flag becomes a hand flag in a minute: cut out the small flag on a stick, tape it to a straw or a craft stick, and children have something to wave at the parade. The fireworks page makes a card for a July party, and the picnic table page is a placemat for the same meal, colored before the food comes out.

For a classroom, pages with a scene in them, the school, the fire station, the town square, the farm, make a good starting point for a talk about where people see the flag in their own town. Pinned in a row, they cover a bulletin board from the coast to the cornfields.

Printing a flag for every child

The PDFs are free, sized for A4 at 300 dpi. On A4, print at 100 %; on US Letter, choose "fit to page", which shrinks the drawing by about six percent and keeps every stripe. The printing guide shows the option in each browser. Add to pack gathers several pages into one file for a class. Summer celebrations continue in the summer coloring pages, and the holiday coloring pages collect the rest of the calendar.