Last Updated on May 25, 2026 by Masha Eretnova
School holidays stretch long, and the “I’m bored” chorus starts around day three. These free printable summer placemats give little hands something to do without a screen in sight.
The set works at the kitchen table, in the classroom, at a café while you wait for food, or tucked into the car for a road trip. Print, hand over a few crayons, and you’ve bought yourself a quiet twenty minutes.
What are activity placemats?
An activity placemat is a single printed page that sits under a plate or on any flat surface and doubles as a game sheet. It usually has a variety of activities and lots of coloring.
Kids colour, count, scramble words, and solve puzzles right on the mat. You print a fresh one whenever you need it, so there’s no app, no batteries, and no screens. Also, no cutting or folding, or gluing.
For preschoolers, the pages build early skills like letter recognition, counting, and pencil control. For older kids, the word searches and scrambles add a bit more challenge. And no matter the age, coloring is always an easy activity to suggest to your kids.
What’s inside the printable set
Four pages, packed with summer-themed puzzles and colouring:
🌞 Summer Adventure — word scramble, connect the dots, tic-tac-toe you can play with your child or kids can play together, and a “how many balls can you find?” counting hunt
🏖️ Hello Summer — beach word search, word match, and spot the differences
🎨 Summer Breeze — colour by number with a full colour key, plus a guess-the-word puzzle
🦋 Fantastic Summer — a busy scene where kids count the animals and insects
Every page mixes a thinking task with a colouring task, so kids who finish fast still have something to do.
Supplies you’ll need
You almost certainly have all of this at home already:
🖨️ A printer and a few sheets of A4 paper + Printed Pages
✏️ Crayons, coloured pencils, or markers. Pencils require more time to color than crayons or markers and markers give the brightest color but cheap ones dry out too fast.
If you’re not at home or somewhere where you can sit at a table, simply bring a clipboard. I recommend using the ones with storage so you keep printed pages in one place, too. Super handy.
How to use the placemats
Print the pages
Open the PDF and print all four pages. Standard A4 paper works fine, and black-and-white printing keeps the cost down since kids add the colour themselves.
Laminate for repeat use (optional)
Run each page through a laminator or slip it into a clear sleeve. Kids then colour with whiteboard markers, wipe clean, and start again. One set lasts the whole summer this way.
Read the colour key and tasks together
The colour-by-number page uses eight colours, each tied to a number. Younger kids sound out the numbers with you, which sneaks in a little maths practice while they colour.
Best ways to use them
A printable set earns its place when you use it in more than one spot. A few ideas:
- Restaurant and café visits — slide one under the cutlery and order in peace
- Road trips — clip a page to a board so the car bumps don’t ruin the lines
- Classroom mornings — set them out as a soft-start task before the lesson begins
- Birthday parties — pop one on each seat as a quiet activity between cake and games
- Rainy days — the indoor saviour when the beach plan falls through
- Quiet time — older and younger siblings each find a page at their level
Teachers running an animals or nature unit can pull the counting and word pages on their own. The “Fantastic Summer” page pairs neatly with a lesson on insects and minibeasts.
Download the free printable
Grab the full four-page set by popping your email in the box below.
A few extra tips
Keep a small zip-lock bag of crayons and a couple of printed pages in your handbag or the glovebox.
Print doubles of the popular pages.
Date the bottom corner before you file the finished pages. By the end of summer you’ll have a little stack showing how much their colouring has grown.
Masha Eretnova, born in 1991, is a Chiang Mai-based certified teacher, artist, and blogger with 20+ years of personal painting journey.
She started painting and drawing very early and is now an international abstract artist and educator passionate about acrylic painting, gouache, and crafts.
Her works are part of international exhibitions and contests, including ArtlyMix (Brazil), Al-Tiba 9 (Spain), Exhibizone (Canada), Italy, and many more.
Besides her artistic pursuits, Masha holds a post-grad diploma in Teaching Film Photography and 2 music school diplomas: piano and opera singing.