Learning to recognize numbers doesn’t take flash cards. Most kids pick it up from seeing the same shapes over and over in places they actually care about.
Our Number Monsters Printable Coloring Book is ten pages, one for each number from 0 to 9. The numbers are the monsters. A 3 with a face and a tail. A 7 with ears and teeth. Your child colors the numeral itself.
The same ten also come as a table size coloring banner, big enough for two or three kids to work on at once. And, we have a size that fits our Modern Activity Table specifically.
Download the printable at the bottom of the post.
Why the Number Is the Monster
A numeral by itself is an abstract shape with nothing to hold onto. There’s no reason a young child should care about a 6, and mostly they don’t.
Give it eyes and it becomes somebody. Now your child has a reason to look at it closely, which is the part that matters. To color a monster, they have to work their way around the whole shape. Their hand follows the curve of the 6 and the corner of the 4 because that’s where the coloring goes.
They aren’t practicing numbers. They’re coloring a monster. The shape gets familiar anyway.
What Coloring Builds
Coloring tends to get treated as the thing kids do while the adults are busy. It’s doing more than that.
Holding a crayon and controlling where it goes builds the same hand and finger muscles a child needs later for writing. Staying inside a line, or trying to, is early practice at getting your hand to go where your eyes are looking. Filling a whole shape takes sustained attention, and that stretches a little further every year.
None of it happens because a page is educational. It happens because the child stays with it. Which comes down to whether they like what’s on the page.
Who It’s For
The pages work for about ages 2 to 6, but they’re aimed at kids who are just starting to learn their numbers.
A two year old will color over everything and never notice the numeral. That’s fine. The motor practice happens regardless. Somewhere around three or four they start pointing at it and naming it, and that’s when it starts doing the other job.
If your child already has our coloring banner, these will be familiar. Same ten monsters. Kids who colored the banner usually have a favorite already.
How to Use Them
Don’t print all ten at once. A stack of ten pages becomes a workbook. One page becomes a thing.
Print the number your child is working on, or let them pick. When a page is done, put it up. Ten colored monsters taped up in order is a number line your child made, and they walk past it every day.
Standard 8.5 by 11, so anything you already have paper for will print them.
If you want them reusable, slide a page into a dry erase sleeve and they can start over as many times as they want.
Get the Number Monsters Coloring Book
Add your name and email below and the file comes to your inbox. Ten pages, ready to print.
Tell us which monster your kids fought over.
