Christmas color by number

What is on this page

Forty eight free A4 sheets, every one of them a christmas picture that only appears once the numbers have been read correctly, and every one with its finished version as a separate answer page. Nothing here needs an account and nothing carries a watermark. Three different kinds of sheet share the page because they answer the same question in three different ways.

Twenty two of them are drawings: a snowman, a red nosed reindeer, five gingerbread men, a candy cane, a snow globe, a cat and a puppy and a penguin all in the same hat. Every closed shape holds a small printed number and the key along the bottom says which crayon that number wants.

Twenty of them are grids of arithmetic, and there is no number printed on the puzzle page at all. Each of the 154 squares carries a sum, a subtraction, a times table fact or a division, and the answer is what sends you to the key. Six more are intricate geometric patterns for somebody who has outgrown cartoons.

How does christmas color by number work?

Each closed area of the picture carries a number, and a key at the bottom of the page pairs every number with a colour. You fill each area with the colour its number names, and the finished christmas picture only appears if every number was read correctly. It is a coloring page with a puzzle inside it.

The math sheets, and who they are for

These are the ones a teacher usually comes here for. A math color by number does not print the number: it prints a problem, and the child produces the number themselves. That changes what the sheet is worth. On an ordinary worksheet a wrong answer earns a red mark from an adult; here a wrong answer puts a green square in the middle of a gingerbread man, and the child sees it before anyone else does.

• Addition to 10. Three sheets whose answers all sit between 4 and 10, so a child who counts on their fingers can still finish one. Suitable from about five.
• Addition to 20. Three sheets in the teens, where finger counting starts to run out and number bonds take over.
• Subtraction, and mixed operations. Two subtraction sheets and two that put addition and subtraction on the same grid, so the operator has to be read as carefully as the digits.
• Times tables 2 to 5, and 6 to 9. Eight sheets. The upper set has answers on the key running up to 54, which is the range where a child either knows the fact or does not.
• Division. Two sheets, every problem dividing exactly, with answers from 2 to 8.

Every problem on every sheet was checked against its own colour before the file was published: the site reads back the printed text of each of the 154 squares, works out what it says, and confirms it matches the answer the key gives that square's colour. A sheet where even one square disagreed would not have been built.

How the drawings are numbered

The quiet failure of most christmas color by number pages is a shape too small for its own numeral. The number then either spills into the shape next door or is left out, and a child has to guess. These drawings were measured shape by shape: the numeral sits at the widest point of its area and is scaled to fit it, and any drawing with an area too small to hold a legible number did not make the page. Very small details, an eye highlight or the pupil inside a cartoon eye, are filled as line work the way a printed coloring book handles them, rather than being numbered at three millimetres across.

The candy cane and the striped present are the two sheets worth pointing a child at first. Their stripes have to alternate the whole way round, so a single misread number is visible from across the room. That is the point of them.

Sizes, from four years old to a long evening

The drawings run from four numbered areas up to fifty six, and the keys from three colours to eight. The gingerbread man with three buttons is the smallest thing on the site; the reindeer standing in the snow with a collar of bells is the largest. The six geometric patterns at the foot of the page are a different object again, from 61 numbered regions to 300, with keys of up to ten colours, and none of them is finishable in one sitting.

Every card states the exact area and colour count for its own sheet, measured from that drawing rather than estimated, so you can judge the work before spending the ink.

Printing them

Choose actual size or 100 percent rather than fit to page. Every sheet already carries a 15mm margin, which is also why these A4 files print on US Letter without cropping. The puzzle page prints fine in black and white: the key spells every colour out in words as well as showing a swatch, so a greyscale print loses nothing but speed. Only the answer page wants colour ink, and you do not have to print it at all.

The answer pages, and finding a sheet again

Every sheet here has one, and it is a separate download rather than a corner of the same page, so you can hand out the puzzle and keep the answer. For a class, the economical set is the puzzle in bulk and one answer page for whoever is supervising. Each description ends with a puzzle number that identifies that exact sheet permanently, so a sheet that worked well with a group is easy to find again next December.

If you want the same mechanic without the season, the color by number printables page carries thirty drawings that are not christmas, and color by number for adults carries thirty six patterns built for a long evening. Nothing on either page is repeated here.