Family Colouring-In is Awesome – Download

School holidays are great but you can also find yourself looking for activities sometimes and this is one that we find works really well. Colouring-in … with a twist. 

This works on so many levels because instead of normal colouring, this is collaborative. We grab a nice high resolution adult colouring that we think that the kids will love theme-wise and make sure it has a lot of detail. Then instead of printing it out on the home printer, take the file to Officeworks or a print shop and get it blown up on a plan printer which cost us about $6 for A0 or $4 for A1.

My suggestion would be that A1 is better clarity and good for up to 3 people colouring at a time but if you have 5 people as we do, then you really need A0. The image was a little pixelated for us but it was easily good enough with such a high resolution original.

You can download files from around the web (check they are free) but here is the one we did and there is another there too – https://www.easypeasyandfun.com/under-the-sea-coloring-pages-for-adults/

Tips To Make It Work

1. Do it with your kids – we find that when an adult is involved it motivates the kids to start and once they do its much easier for them to stay with it. We allocated a time after dinner and before bed to do 30 mins colouring each night.
2. Have plenty of pencils/markers – we just have a big bag of pencils so everyone can have mostly any colour that they want. We also had to have a sharpener handy.
3. Make some rules – we discussed how we would work together at the beginning. For example, no one could tell anyone what to do or which colours but we encouraged them to plan a little. We also agreed that nobody had the rights to a particular part of the picture but that you could ask people to let you finish an element …. we didn’t want fights over this fun activity haha
4. Take some pics – every now and then to show the progress in a series.
5. Display it – At the end you can put it in a cheap frame on a bedroom wall, laminate it or just discard it. My kids are hoarders so it will be kept for a while anyway.

Finally, any task like this or jigsaws etc are amazing times to talk to your children. Its bonding to work together but more importantly, when hands are occupied like this the discussion can flow much more easily so I just take the chance to ask them about parts of their days and their friendships etc

Have fun!

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