17 Cute Dinosaur Coloring Pages (free printable)

17 Free cute Dinosaur Coloring pages preschool

Continuing with the series of dinosaur-themed printables I’ve created 17 cute dinosaur coloring pages.

All children like dinosaurs, right? And guess what, they love coloring too – so it’s safe to presume that cute dinosaur coloring pages are bound to be a hit!

They’re based on the dinosaur characters I created recently and feature 12 different dinosaurs – from the ocean dwelling Plesiosaur to the high-soaring Pteranadon.

Let your kids get creative. Will their dinosaurs be spotty or hairy? Friendly or scary? It’s really up to them!

They’d also be great to use as templates for dinosaur crafts or as a fun activity for anyone having a dinosaur themed party.

You can check out the other cute dinosaur printables below:

Contents show

What Skills Can Your kids Learn When Coloring?

Now you may not think it, but there’s actually quite a lot of skills that can be practiced and developed when your children are happily coloring away.

These dino coloring pages can help your children practice and develop their writing skills, such as:

Hand-eye coordination – to be able to understand what they are seeing and get their hands to go where they want them to go
Hand and finger strength – the ability to be able to apply enough pressure to make marks on the page and hold the pencil firmly
Hand dominance – developing and strengthening the skill of one of their hands
Crossing the mid-line – this is the ability to cross the imaginary line running down the center of your body – it means they won’t have to switch hands if they want to color on the other side of the page
Pencil control – holding the pencil correctly to allow for a full and fluid range of movement

These are all vital skills that will set them up to be brilliant at writing in the future! But let’s not forget:

Creativity – coloring is a great way to promote a child’s creativity. Will they make their dinosaur spotty or stripy? Will they draw a background? Will there be a story to go along with the dinosaur and will they give their creation a name?

Coloring pages can also be great for children’s focus when they’re trying their hardest to stay in the lines, and I’m sure as anyone out there who’s ever picked up an ‘adult’ coloring book – they can also be a great way to relax and have a moment of calm.

How To Prepare These Cute Dinosaur Coloring Pages

First you need to download them by clicking on the image below:

I’d advise printing them double sided if you want to make them into a booklet but you could also just pick and choose individual pages if you’d prefer.

Here’s a few of the sheets – there’s 17 in total excluding the cover (which they could of course also color in!)

If you print them all out, you could then staple them to make a dinosaur coloring booklet to keep them all together.

That’s pretty much it – just need to grab some pencils, pens or crayons and they’re good to go!

How you could use these cute dinosaur coloring pages

Coloring

You can obviously just give your kids the dinosaur coloring booklet and let them crack on. It’s good to just let them experiment sometimes and marvel at what they can create.

Sometimes though, it might be nice to give them a few ideas. Can they make one spotty? How about a stripy dinosaur or a lovely patchwork one?

So now they’ve colored in the dinosaur and they’re looking amazing! How about adding in their own background? Maybe have a look at some prehistoric scenes in a book or online for inspiration.

They could add some rocks to the foreground or how about some ferns? Maybe the Tyrannosaurus could be stomping around a forest with a volcano erupting the in background. They could draw their own dragonflies and other bugs buzzing around the dino’s head.

Give them a blank piece of paper and see if they can use them as inspiration and make their own scene. Maybe they could draw a little dino family.

Or forget the pencils and crayons altogether and crack out the paints and let them practice brush control while carefully painting them. You can make some really nice sunset backgrounds by mixing a few water colors.

Crafts

They could also use the coloring sheets as dinosaur templates for crafts. They’d be great to do some collaging with. Just rip up some tissue or colored paper, get out the glue and get sticking.

You could also add pompoms, pipe cleaners, and googly eyes. Or you could go outside and scavenge some natural materials. Sticks, grass and leaves could all be used to make an awesome background!

If you print them 4 to a page and cut them out after they have colored / decorated them, you could them stick them onto a background they have made on card to make their very own prehistoric scene.

There’s so much you could do with them so let them get creative and have fun!

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I hope you and your children enjoy these coloring sheets and create some wonderful art – please let me know how you get on and I’d love to see them (if you email them to me at ash @ nurturedneurons.com, it would be to create a gallery of their art).

Be sure to check back regularly as I’ll be using more dinosaurs in future free printables. If you want to make sure you don’t miss any you can turn on notifications by clicking on the little bell to the right.

You can also check out the other free printables that are already available here.

If you like these dinosaur coloring sheets then please share using the buttons below!

Until next time,

Let’s nurture those neurons!