The twenty-six colouring posters are free, one for every letter, and you can have them in about a minute. Printing them well takes slightly longer, and I made three mistakes before I worked it out, so you get to skip that part.
First, get them
They are here, free, no charge and no catch. You add them to the basket and check out at zero, which feels strange the first time, and then the download arrives by email. One PDF, twenty-six pages.
Mistake one: printing on ordinary paper
I used the paper that was in the printer, which was the cheap 75 gram stuff, and the first felt tip went straight through onto my desk.
Use 120 gram if you have it, or the thinnest card your printer will take. It costs a few dollars more for a ream and it is the difference between a picture on the fridge and a picture in the bin. If you only have ordinary paper, put a second sheet underneath. That is not a solution, but it saves the table.
Mistake two: fit to page
Printers default to shrinking a page to fit the margins, which leaves a white border and makes the animal smaller than it should be.
Set Scale to 100% or Actual size, and turn borderless printing on if your printer offers it. The posters are drawn to fill the sheet, and a four-year-old with a fat crayon needs every millimetre of that.
Mistake three: colour ink
They are line drawings. Black lines on white. There is nothing to gain from colour ink and you will burn a cartridge for no reason.
Set the printer to greyscale or black ink only. On most printers this also switches to a faster draft mode, which is fine here. Nobody is judging the resolution of an outline.
What to do with twenty-six of them
Do not print all twenty-six at once. I did that too, and produced a stack that sat untouched because it looked like homework.
Print three or four. Let the child pick which letters. Then print more when those come back coloured. A poster your child asked for gets coloured, a poster that appeared in a pile does not.
Some other things that have worked in houses I know about:
- One a week, taped to the same spot on the kitchen wall, so by summer there is an alphabet round the room.
- The letter of whatever went wrong that day. A rough afternoon and the impatient hare gets printed, and nobody has to say anything about it.
- Two copies of one letter, one for each child, so there is no argument about who gets the fox.
And if the colouring goes well
There is a much larger version of this. The colouring book that comes with the storybook is 168 pages, traced from the paintings rather than drawn as outlines, and it does not arrive in the box. It is a download, unlocked by a word on the last page of your storybook, and you can print any page as many times as you like.
That comes with the full ecosystem, $49.95 during the launch.
But start with the free twenty-six. They are the same animals and they cost you nothing but paper, and they will tell you within a week whether your child is a colourer or not.
Next, the question I get asked most and answer least comfortably: is fifty dollars a lot for a children's book, or is it six things.