Thanksgiving Coloring Pages

A turkey tail is the most useful shape in November: a row of separate feathers, each a closed area, each wanting a different color. These 29 free printable Thanksgiving coloring pages are built around that first, and around the table the bird ends up on second.

What is in the Thanksgiving set

• Turkey coloring pages, eleven of them: standing between pumpkins, tail fanned wide, posing with a bundle of wheat, and one floating over a parade as a balloon.
• The table: a full Thanksgiving setting with the roasted turkey, mashed potatoes, bread and herbs, a family sitting around it, and two children with a glass of milk each.
• Cornucopias, four, spilling pumpkins, grapes, corn and nuts, one of them on a wooden table and one with a face.
• Pie: an apple pie with a lattice crust and steam rising, a slice on a plate among the leaves, a slice with a smiling face, and a turkey baked into one.
• The harvest: baskets of fruit and vegetables, pumpkins and gourds, apples, a corn stalk with two ears and birds overhead.
• Pilgrims, three sheets, a boy with a pumpkin and a girl with a basket of apples.
• The odd ones: a squirrel and an owl on a picnic in the forest, a pumpkin house with a chimney and a door, a wreath of pumpkins and acorns.

Eleven turkeys, five of them still standing

The bird is the reason this drawer exists, so it is drawn both ways: five alive and six on the table. The living ones are the ones children pick, because a fanned tail is five to nine closed shapes in a row, which is the most satisfying thing a five-year-old can color without going outside a line.

The cooked ones matter for a different reason. A roasted turkey with gravy, a fork and a knife is what the day actually looks like, and it is the sheet that ends up taped to a kitchen wall.

The busy pages and the quick ones

The table setting, the family around the meal and the harvest scene with falling leaves each carry twenty or more separate areas and hold an older child for half an hour. At the other end, the corn stalk, the wreath and the turkey between two pumpkins are done in ten minutes.

That spread is what makes a classroom set work: print a mix and the fast finishers get the table scene while everyone else gets a bird.

What color is a turkey really

A wild turkey is bronze and dark brown with barred feathers, with a bare head that runs blue and red. Nothing here is drawn to that: these birds are round-eyed and friendly, and the tails are left as plain closed shapes on purpose so a child can put a different color in each one.

If you want the page to look deliberate, use warm colors on the bird and cool ones on everything behind it. It is the same rule as the fall drawer, and it works for the same reason.

When these get printed

Nothing happens with this category until the first days of November, and then the whole month is the season at once. Print a week before you need them: everyone in the building hits the same printer on the same afternoon.

The fall coloring pages cover the leaves and the season around the meal, the Halloween set covers the month before, and Christmas picks up the month after. Everything here is a free A4 PDF at 300 dpi, safe on US Letter, and it prints black and white on the worst printer in the building.