Remember when you were a kid and you could get lost for what felt like hours in the simple joy of coloring? Turns out you weren’t just exercising your crayons, but giving your brain a healthy workout, too. The act of coloring calms the amygdala, the emotional processing center of the brain, and stimulates the hippocampus, the seat of creativity.
Coloring also comes with a host of other benefits. From improving a child’s motor skills to teaching them about pressure and force, the great things coloring gives us should be reason enough for anyone to pop open a fresh box of Crayolas! In fact, recent research suggests that short, twenty-minute periods of coloring benefit adults as well, helping to decrease stress and increase relaxation.
So, why not sit down with your kids, grab your favorite color, and take a load off with these free coloring pages inspired by my tooth-fairy-themed children’s book UNDER MY PILLOW? (And if you still need some convincing, here are three more ways coloring supports both body and mind!)
The free coloring pages inspired by my tooth-fairy-themed children’s book UNDER MY PILLOW and available for download here. They can improve kids’ hand-eye coordination, among other benefits.
Coloring improves kids’ hand-eye coordination.
UNDER MY PILLOW follows main character Sam as she loses her first baby tooth. Reading this book aloud to your kids informs them about an important childhood milestone at the same time as coloring the corresponding pages improves their hand-eye coordination.
When a child colors with a crayon, marker, or colored pencil, they’re practicing the same skills they will one day use to write letters and numbers. So even if your child isn’t writing yet, encouraging them to color sets them up for future success.
Coloring gives kids agency.
In a world that seems designed for adults, kids can feel helpless or like they have no personal agency. Yet kids need a sense of control over their own lives to become focused, goal-directed, and optimistic grown-ups.
Allowing a child to freely color—to choose to make their sand castle green and their grass purple—is empowering. Allowing them time and space to figure out their color preferences, and then to express those favorite colors whether through coloring or even dressing themselves, builds confidence, independence, and self-esteem.
Coloring makes the world come alive.
Not only does coloring demonstrate how green is different from red and different from purple—thereby reinforcing the names of colors—but coloring pictures of animals and objects from the “real world” makes that world come alive and feel closer…even if your child colors the zebra yellow instead of black and white! That’s because, according to the American Psychological Association, color adds a layer of beauty and complexity to drawing that actually increases our retention of the image.
And so without further ado, here are those free coloring pages!
Download my free coloring pages here.
Purchase Under My Pillow on Amazon
When you’ve finished with the coloring pages, try my UNDER MY PILLOW maze and word search, too!
Mazes are called brain-teasers for a reason. Hard-to-solve mazes challenge kids’ hand-eye coordination, motor skills, and cognitive reasoning, and build their patience and confidence. Word searches, meanwhile, serve to introduce new vocabulary words and reinforce early spelling skills. Can you find all eleven words?
Download my free tooth-themed maze and word search, perfect for kids aged four to eight.
Finally, you can buy the physical book these digital images came from and enjoy a fun children’s story about the tooth fairy here:
Purchase Under My Pillow on Amazon
You can purchase and check out more info related to UNDER MY PILLOW here. Be sure to follow Jennifer on social media too — https://www.instagram.com/jenballow/
One Response
Thanks so much for featuring my book and posting my blog! Really appreciate the promotion. 🙂