I hear from teachers who are buying their own paper. That is not a situation I can fix, but I can at least make sure that one thing in the room costs nothing.
The free part
Twenty-six colouring posters, one animal per letter. A to Z. No charge, no subscription, no account beyond the download.
You may print them for a class. You may print the same one thirty times. That is what they are for, and I would rather they were on a wall in a school than sitting behind a payment.
How to print them properly
I got this wrong three times before I got it right, so here is the short version.
- Scale to 100%, not fit to page. The default shrinks them and leaves a border, and the animal ends up smaller than a fat crayon needs.
- Greyscale or black ink only. They are line drawings. Colour ink is wasted and greyscale usually switches to a faster mode too.
- Heavier paper if you have it. Anything under about 100 gram will bleed through with felt tip. If you only have the thin stuff, a second sheet underneath saves the table.
The longer version is here.
Twelve things to do with a printed poster
Beyond colouring it in.
- One a week on the wall, in order, until the alphabet goes round the room.
- Cut one into four and have a group reassemble it.
- Write the letter on it, large, in the corner, and let them copy it.
- Have them draw what happens next, on the back.
- Hold one up and ask what the animal did wrong, before anyone has heard the story.
- Two copies of the same animal for two children, so there is no argument about the fox.
- Fold one into a card for somebody's birthday.
- Laminate one for the reading corner if you have a laminator, which you probably do not.
- Send one home in a book bag as the week's word.
- Colour it as a group, one child per section.
- Sort a pile by which animal did the worst thing. The argument is the activity.
- Put the leftovers in the wet-play drawer and forget about them until it rains.
The wet-play problem
Every teacher has a drawer for the days when nobody goes outside. The trouble with that drawer is that it fills with things that entertain for six minutes and then need you again.
A stack of printed posters solves about forty minutes of a wet lunchtime, and the children who finish early can start on somebody else's letter. It is not a teaching triumph. It is a functioning drawer, which on a wet Wednesday is worth more.
What else costs nothing
Aesop is out of copyright. Every fable in the tradition is free, in any library, in every language. If all you take from this page is that, it was worth writing.
A wall, a marker and one word a week is a complete character education programme, and I set the whole method out here at no charge either.
And the paid part, said once
If a school does have a budget, the full set is $49.95 during the launch and one copy runs a whole class, because everything except the book and the cards is a download.
But the posters are free whether you ever buy anything or not. That is not a trial period and it does not expire.