Life Cycles & Growing Things

About this coloring page

Sequence is a hard idea for young children and a coloring page is a surprisingly good way to teach it. Every sheet in this category shows the same thing at several moments in its life, laid out so the order is readable before a single word is spoken: a frog cycle drawn as a wheel, a sunflower going from seed to blackened seed head left to right, twenty-one days inside a chicken egg, an acorn becoming an oak that outlives everyone in the room. Colouring them in order is the lesson. Not all of it is biology. Wheat becomes flour becomes a loaf; milk becomes a wheel of Gouda in a warehouse; a compost bin is cut open so you can see kitchen scraps at the top and crumbly soil at the bottom with the worms doing the work in between. Those pages travel well into food-education and sustainability topics. There is no plain butterfly here on purpose, but there is a moth splitting out of its cocoon and a dragonfly nymph climbing a reed to shed its skin, which are the same idea told by something less overused. Most sheets sit in the seven-to-twelve band; the bean sprouting in a jam jar works from three.