Series “Petit escargot” · sheet 1 of 5
The snail and its little house
The snail and its little house: a free printable coloring page, from age 4. Sheet 1 of the 5 in the “Petit escargot” series, the rhyme of the shell.
- Recommended age
- Ages 4 and up · 20 to 40 minutes
- Themes
- Storybook scenes, Little bugs, At home
- Series
- Petit escargot · one of the five in the series
- Season
- Autumn and rainy days
A shell with a window
A big snail fills the whole bottom of the page. Its shell is dotted with circles, and on the side somebody has set a small arched window, latticed like a house window. It is smiling, its two antennae well up. Behind it, a girl in a dress waves a hand, a boy in a striped T-shirt laughs, and a unicorn with small wings stands between the two. Two round trees close off the scene, a smiling sun rises on the right, and stars float in the sky with two clouds.
The first picture of the song
Sheet 1 of 5 in the “Petit escargot” series. The French rhyme holds in a few lines: the snail carries its house on its back, it is in no hurry, and it goes home as soon as it rains. This sheet shows the first line, the one children understand at once, with nothing to explain. The shell has become a little house, window included. Many children know the tune before the words: they recognise the drawing before they can name it, and start humming as they color.
A big shell, and company around it
The shell alone is a quarter of the page: it fills by turning, never meeting a corner, and that is where you start. The rest asks more: the two children and their clothes, the unicorn, the two trees, the sun, the stars in the sky, and the lattice of the window, which is the finest thing here. The outline is thick everywhere, which forgives going over — but there are many places to go, and that is what makes it a sheet for 4. Before that, the shell is enough: the rest can stay white without the drawing looking unfinished.
Coloring in a turn
Start at the center of the shell and work out in a spiral, the way you draw a snail. That circular movement is the one that builds the wrist at this age, and it is the same one that will serve later for writing. One color for the spiral, another for the circles: the result stays legible even if everything strays. Keep the green for last, there is a lot of it — the grass, the flowering bushes, the two trees. On ordinary paper the markers go through a little: slip a sheet underneath.
A word for the grown-up: sing the first line while they color the shell, then stop dead. They will often finish it themselves. It is the simplest way to get a rhyme into a child’s head.
The other sheets of “Petit escargot”
The sheets are drawn on the theme of the same song. Same characters, same line: you print them together.
Coloring pages that go with this one
More pages from the same theme, age or season — the ones you print right after.
