Scroll our downloadable and PDF printable Halloween coloring pages below.
While October typically includes excitement from children because they get to trick or treat for candy, you can use these themed for a kid Halloween coloring sheets to teach them about the holiday and its origins while having fun.
The colors of the holiday typically include orange, black, and purple. You can use other colors, too, but those three remain the traditional ones. Some of the scenes in Halloween coloring pages contain humans and depict traditions such as bobbing for apples. In this case, you need brown and tan colors for the wooden tub and red for the apples. (It’s rare to see green apples used for bobbing.)
Halloween printable pages feature a pumpkin patch or pumpkins for décor. You can use these sheets to spark a discussion of seasonal fruits and vegetables, including pumpkin and gourds. During this time of year, pumpkin flavors pies, tarts, coffees, and soups, while gourds and squash figure into casseroles, fried finger foods, and soups. You can color these pages, then pick up some of the actual foods and prepare them together. Try a squash casserole and pumpkin soup. You can serve pumpkin pie for dessert.
Beyond discussing Halloween color and food, you can also teach about the myths and the truths of the holiday. Of course, ghosts and mummies don’t really walk the streets, but what about the witch in the picture or zombies? You can use these coloring sheets to teach about anthropology and geography to older children. Many areas of the world do practice forms of witchcraft as part of their religion, but they do not dress in black with pointy hats nor do they ride brooms. You can also explain how the story of zombies got its start – in the Caribbean islands. There shamans use a medicinal plant to slow a person’s heart rate and breathing to the point that they appear dead. Since autopsies aren’t common there, these people often wake to find themselves lying in a coffin at their own wake! Occasionally, they have been out cold when buried. Upon waking, they dig themselves out and return to their village. A Harvard anthropologist, Wade Davis, traveled to one of these islands during the 1980s to document this phenomena and met a few of the so-called zombies. The culture had long practiced this, and ship’s captains and their crews had carried the stories back to other lands for centuries.
Of course, younger children won’t be ready for such serious topics, but you can stick to the difference between a pumpkin and a Halloween pumpkin called a jack-o’-lantern. You can color any face you want to onto a pumpkin to make it a jack-o’-lantern. Remember to provide a yellow or gold glow in the center to show the burning candle inside.
These free Halloween coloring page projects include many Happy Halloween coloring page projects that you can use as holiday cards. Have kids color one for each set of grandparents, then mail them to their grandparents.
Other ideas include printing large pumpkin or ghost, or witch pictures to color, then making DIY masks from by laminating them. This makes them sturdy enough to use a hole punch to create a hole on either side to run string through. You can tie the mask on in back, so you don’t have to hold it up. This idea also works with a printable coloring page of a sugar skull, vampire, monster, or black cat.
Before you go to the creepy haunted house, teach your kids, especially little ones who might easily become scared, that they have nothing to fear from the Halloween fun. Use this printable coloring book to celebrate a Happy Halloween and create Halloween crafts using colored pencils, crayons, markers, colored pens, or paints.
