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When searching for great entertainment for children, one of the very best choices for children of a certain age is free coloring pages. There are literally tens of thousands of these coloring pages available without cost on the internet. The web sites that host them may vary in terms of navigability and convenience (for example, some are so polluted with ads that it can be difficult to find your way to the final task of printing the picture of your choice), but once you get the hang of it, you'll find virtually limitless resources available. But if you've got a computer, internet connection, printer and printer paper (and, of course, crayons or coloring pencils!)...you have everything you need to provide thousands of hours of free entertainment for your children! For younger children, even less is required. Rather than printing out the pictures and col-oring them, there are many choices of online coloring for kids. In this format, the pic-tures stay on the computer screen, and children use the cursor to pick a color, then click in the area of the image that they want to fill with that color. It teaches them not only a sense of the coordination of colors, but also the basics of pointing and clicking with a computer mouse. Once the picture is completely colored, if you have a color printer, you can print it out for them. Voila...instant refrigerator art! Free coloring pages are something that can grow with children as they grow, and can also teach them along the way. It may start out with simple shapes and basic colors, but over time...either by experimentation or mimicry...children can learn to soften or increase the pressure on the crayon or pencil...and can learn to add or bolden certain lines to in-crease focus or sense of motion. They also learn how colors appear in nature, as well as what color combinations appeal to themselves personally. Children may wish to collect many coloring pages on a certain topic and make them into a book. They can also double as clip art for school assignments, greeting cards or science fair projects. The number of free coloring pages available online contiunes to increase over time. Some of the categories of images available include: animals, bird species, cat breeds, Christmas and other holidays, cowboy stuff, dinosaurs, dog breeds, fairies and other mythical creatures, household (for example, furniture and appliances), insects, medieval, musical, ocean and marine life, people and their jobs, princess pictures, sports-related and the wonders of the world. In just browsing these categories, you can get a sense of the various stages in a child's life when he/she might be interested in each of these topics. As with most kinds of learning, one stream of activity feeds another. So as a child colors a picture of an anteater, he is likely to become curious about how its anatomy functions and how it interacts with its environment. And as well, when a child hears a story involv-ing a centaur, she may well go on a hunt for a picture to color. Both online coloring for kids and free coloring pages can play a role in this type of learning cycle. Because of the extreme variety available and the extremely low cost of obtaining these coloring pages (paper and printer toner), they make an ideal activity for rainy days or while traveling. You can quickly find many web sites that offer free coloring pages by using any internet search engine. There are also many sites that feature online coloring for kids on a wide variety of topics for younger children to click and color.
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