Teacher Coloring Pages

Most pictures of teachers show someone pointing at a blackboard. These teacher coloring pages show the rest of the job, the part children actually remember: the teacher who knelt down to help with a shoelace, who brought in the tadpoles, who held the umbrella at the gate.

In the classroom, a teacher threads beads with a little boy at a low table, waters a row of seedlings on the windowsill, pins a paper flower onto a board full of crayon drawings, pours paint for the art table and crouches to gather a box of spilled crayons. She marks a pile of papers at her desk beside a potted fern, holds up a paper snowflake, carries an armful of rolled drawings in a cardigan covered in pins, sets up an easel and hangs paper lanterns from the ceiling. A science teacher in goggles lifts a bubbling flask, and a class crowds around a tank of tadpoles.

Outside the classroom, a teacher leads a line of children holding a walking rope, sits on the recess wall with a cup of tea, leads a nature walk in rain boots with a magnifying glass, plants seedlings in the school garden and blows bubbles in the schoolyard. Another holds an umbrella over two children at the gate in the rain, and another winds a scarf on before stepping into the snow. Music has its own pages, a choir with every mouth open, a piano with children leaning on the lid, a box of tambourines and maracas being unpacked. The year's big days are here too: a birthday cake carried in under the bunting, and a graduation with a small student in cap and gown taking a rolled diploma. For something to frame, there is a teacher portrait in a ring of sunflowers, a chibi teacher hugging a stack of paper, a mandala built from pencils, scissors and brushes, and a border of apples, oak leaves and pencil shavings around a bunch of daisies.

A thank-you card a child can make

The most common reason to print a teacher coloring page is to give it back, colored, to a real teacher. The sunflower portrait was drawn for that. Before coloring, ask the child what their teacher looks like: hair color, glasses or not, a favorite sweater. Coloring the portrait to match turns a generic page into a picture of one person, and teachers keep those.

To make it a card, fold a second sheet in half and glue the finished page to the front, or simply write a message on the back of the page itself. The daisy border works as a frame for a short note written in the middle, and the chibi teacher with her stack of paper suits a joke about marking.

The dates to plan around: in the United States, Teacher Appreciation Week falls in the first full week of May, and World Teachers' Day is October 5 everywhere, set by UNESCO. The last week of the school year is the other obvious moment, and the graduation page belongs there.

Why the apple, and why the garden

The apple in the border comes from an old habit. The usual explanation is that families who could not pay much for schooling paid part of it in produce, and an apple was the simplest gift a child could carry to class. The custom outlived the reason, and the apple became the symbol of teaching.

The garden pages have a better story. The word kindergarten, German for "children's garden", was coined in 1840 by Friedrich Fröbel, who believed young children should grow the way plants do, with care and room, and who gave each child a small plot to tend. He also designed a set of simple wooden blocks for learning shape and number, which is why a teacher steadying a tower of blocks with a child is as old a picture of school as the blackboard. The seedlings on the windowsill and the school garden bed are the same idea, still in use.

Coloring the people

The people on these pages come in outline only, with no skin or hair color decided, so children decide who they are. A set of skin-tone crayons or pencils, from the palest peach to a deep brown, lets every child color people who look like their own class. Hair can be any shade, and a teacher's cardigan is the place for the brightest color on the page.

For the busy classroom scenes, color the people first and the room last. A child who starts on the walls often runs out of patience before reaching the faces, which are the part that matters.

Which pages for which age

These are scenes more than portraits, with rooms, furniture and other children around the teacher, so few of them are quick. The simplest keep the teacher large and the background light, which suits a child of five or six. Quick to color, above the grid, shows them, starting with:

• Teacher picking up spilled crayons
• Teacher decorating a door with paper leaves
• Teacher pouring paint on an art table

The rest ask for patience, and several are full rooms where every jar, lantern and flower pot is its own shape. They suit an older child, or a teacher coloring alongside the class at quiet time. Lots of detail opens on the densest:

• Teacher portrait in a sunflower frame
• Border of apples, leaves and pencils with daisies
• Teacher hanging paper lanterns in class

A bulletin board of the school year

For a teacher printing these for a class, give each child a different page and pin them all up in the order of the school year: the snowflake and the scarf for winter, the seedlings and the garden for spring, the leaf-covered door for fall, the graduation to close. The children see their year as a set of scenes, and the board changes nothing about the lesson plan. The music pages go well on a music room door, and the tadpole tank and the flask on a science corner.

Printing a page for every child

Every page is a free PDF made for A4 at 300 dpi: print at actual size on A4, or choose "fit to page" on US Letter, which makes the drawing about six percent smaller. The printing guide explains the setting. Use Add to pack to gather a page for every child and print them in one go. The letter coloring pages and the fall coloring pages fit the first weeks of term, and the happy birthday coloring pages cover the birthdays in between.