Zoo Animal Coloring Pages

A zoo visit gives a child about ten seconds in front of each enclosure. A coloring page gives them twenty minutes with the same animal. These free zoo animal coloring pages cover the fifteen residents kids actually stop and stare at, from the giraffe browsing the top of the tree to the meerkat standing sentry on its mound. Every one of these printable zoo animal coloring pages downloads as a PDF sized for US Letter paper.

The tall, the striped and the heavy

Giraffes, zebras, hippos and rhinos anchor this set, because those four are what children draw first after a zoo trip. Each one hides a small coloring decision worth knowing about. A giraffe's patches are not brown blobs on cream, they are irregular tiles separated by pale channels, and those channels are what make the pattern read correctly. A zebra grows white stripes over black skin, so leaving the paper bare inside the light bands is already accurate. Hippos are grey with a pink flush around the eyes, ears and muzzle. Rhino hide sits in thick plates with deep folds at the shoulder and hip, and those folds are the only shading a rhino sheet really needs.

Big cats, bears and the animals with their own sets

The tiger and the lion sit next to each other at almost every zoo, and they do here too. This set includes a tiger pacing beside its pool, and when the tiger lands well, the lion coloring pages go deeper into the pride, the cubs and the savanna hunt. The bear house points the same way: panda coloring pages cover the bamboo, the cubs and the sitting poses that give those black and white blocks room to work.

The elephant house and the primates

Elephants take one sheet here and fourteen more of their own on the elephant coloring pages, where the African and Asian ear shapes, the herds and the calves each get a page. The primate sheets in this set cover a monkey swinging from a branch and a gorilla sitting with her baby. Gorillas reward a slower approach. Keep the face, hands and chest hairless and near black, then let the silver saddle across an adult male's back stay several shades lighter than the rest of the coat.

Birds, water and the reptile house

Flamingos wade in the shallow pool, a toucan perches in the aviary and the crocodile suns itself on the bank. Flamingos take their pink from what they eat, so a chick colored plain grey is not a mistake, it is a fact. For more birds, the penguin coloring pages and owl coloring pages carry full sets, and the aquarium wing continues at shark coloring pages and ocean animal coloring pages.

Zoo coloring pages for preschool

Eight of these sheets use thick outlines and large open shapes, which is what a three or four year old needs to stay inside a line. The koala, the kangaroo with a joey, the monkey, the toucan, the zookeeper and the zoo entrance sign make the easiest starting points. Teachers often pair each one with the animal's name in large letters underneath, and the zoo entrance sheet doubles as the cover of a homemade zoo booklet.

Printing free zoo animal coloring sheets

Every printable zoo animal coloring page on this list prints on US Letter at 100 percent scale with no sign up. Plain copy paper handles crayons and colored pencils. Switch to cardstock when children reach for markers, because marker ink bleeds through copy paper and ruins the sheet underneath. Print the whole set at once and you have a zoo field trip packet, one animal per child, ready before the bus leaves.