Inside: Inspire kids to speak and act with kindness more often with this Kindness Zoo Coloring Pages where each animal from A-Z suggests a different acct of kindness.
One hot summer day when my kids were bored and I was super overhearing how bored they were, we packed a picnic lunch and headed to our zoo.
Since we were new to this town, this was our first visit to this zoo and they had a blast.
We went racing through the zoo together, reading the maps and the trail signs to find their favorite animals.
My kids and I were on the hunt for polar bears and panda bears and an okapi for me.
The zoo day ended in a splurge…we went on a camel ride together and we all loved it.
Zoo animals are intriguing for all of us…it’s a glimpse into different continents and different habitats that we may never get a chance to visit in real life.
So zoo animals make it easy to teach other concepts like counting and adding and the alphabet and character education.
The animals in our Kindness Zoo Coloring Pages will connect zoo animals, the abcs and character education as kids color and get inspired to speak and act with kindness more often, just like the zoo animals on their coloring sheets.
Why Teaching Character Education is Crucial
Our kids and their me-centered brains are wired to be self-focused. So they can often be unintentionally thoughtless or unkind to each other because they’re trying to figure out the world and how they fit into it.
And while some kids are more generous and thoughtful and giving than their peers, for the majority of kids, my kids included, we have to intentionally teach them to be kind.
We can read kindness books like these:
To teach kindness, we can also use these Kindness Emergent Readers that cover topics like speaking with kindness and being helpful and being kind out on the playground.
We can also use these 60 Kindness Discussion Starters to talk about kindness and this Trash or Kindness Game.
Character education and learning how to treat other people and interact with others in a positive way is crucial to kids’ development and schooling.
Social Emotional Learning and Character Education have a place in our schools and our homes because we have to teach our kids how to be real friends, friendly classmates, loving family members, and kind citizens of our communities.
And there are lots of ways to teach our kids how to be kind including these 10 simple ways to teach SEL Curriculum and these Kindness Zoo Coloring pages.
How to Use these Kindness Zoo Coloring Pages
1. Download and print the Kindness Zoo Coloring Pages (download them below).
2. Introduce each page one at a time, read the words with your kids and explain how the animal is going to show kindness.
It would be a great addition to your Letter of the Week Program or as you introduce the alphabet to your kids because the kids can color in the uppercase and lowercase letters highlighted on each page.
It’s also a great addition to a zoo animal unit to introduce kids to different kinds of animals you can find at the zoo.
If you do this, you can show them pictures of the animals so they know the realistic colors to use.
3. As an extension if you’re learning about the animals, you can ask the kids to draw their habitat as the background for their coloring page. Does it live in the savannah or the jungle or the arctic?
4. Or you can bind all the pages together with staples or spiral bound it and turn it into a coloring book kids can color.
5. Explain the kindness phrase and challenge your kids to do the kindness activities each animal suggests as they color the animal.
From A-Z, they’ll do 26 acts of kindness.
When they color the Antelope, they can ask how they can help someone.
When they color the Bear, they can bring their friend a gift or a note.
And when they get to color the Zebra, they can zealously (enthusiastically) cheer on a friend.
Because getting our kids to speak and act with kindness more often and learn the letters of the alphabet and zoo animals is a triple win.
Download the Kindness Zoo Coloring Pages here.
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