Best 20 Fruit of the Spirit Printables for Kids
Two of my kids fought over one scooter in the front yard last Tuesday. One scooter, two children, both of them absolutely certain they had it first, and me standing on the step with a dish towel trying to remember which fruit of the Spirit I was supposed to be modeling. Patience, probably. I did not have any. The three-year-old watched from the grass like it was television.
I’m Rebecca. Three kids, eight and six and three, and a husband who runs the youth group at our church, so verses live in the walls of this house whether anybody planned it that way or not. I also fill in for the little-kids Sunday school class when the regular teacher needs a Sunday off. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Nine words, and at least four of them mean nothing to a six-year-old until he has seen one. He asked me straight out last month, standing at the fridge under a magnet shaped like a bunch of grapes, whether kindness is when you stay quiet. I said no, sometimes kindness is loud, and then I could not explain the difference, so I printed something instead.
What follows is sixteen printable sets I’ve run through my own three and through a room of other people’s children who have had too much juice. Coloring pages, big packs, wall verses, the sheets I tape up and the ones I quietly recycle. Honest reviews, duds named alongside keepers. Heads up: some links below are affiliate links, so if you grab something through one it helps keep PsalmKids going at no extra cost to you. The verses do the heavy lifting. I’m just telling you which files don’t fight you on the way there.
Heads up: some links below are affiliate links. If you grab something through them it helps keep PsalmKids running, at no extra cost to you.
The Fat-Line Set That Finally Gave My Three-Year-Old a Win
Bold and easy means the outlines are thick enough that a toddler with a fistful of crayon stays roughly inside them. That sounds like a small thing. It is not a small thing at my table, where the difference between a finished page and a meltdown is usually just line weight.
I use these for the hard words. Patience is not a picture, so I hand her a big simple figure and say we’re coloring the man who waited, and she colors, and she hears the word four times while she does it. That’s the whole trick. Nobody sits a three-year-old down and defines longsuffering. You just keep the word in the room while her hands are busy.
The gripe: the character faces are generic enough that my eight-year-old asked which one was supposed to be which, and I could not always tell her. If you want recognizable Bible figures, label them yourself in pencil before you hand them out. Takes a minute per stack.
Cute Enough That My Six-Year-Old Stopped Asking to Skip It
This is the softer, rounder style, and I resisted it for a while because I thought it was babyish. Then I watched the six-year-old choose it over the plain sets three Saturdays running, so I stopped having an opinion.
Joy is the one I use these for. It’s the easiest of the nine to explain and the hardest to fake, and a smiling round drawing does more of the work than I do. He colored one, taped it to his door, and told me joy is when you’re happy on purpose. I have not improved on that definition.
The gripe: the cute style flattens the serious pages. There’s a crucifixion scene in the set rendered in the same bouncy line as everything else and it lands wrong. I pulled that one out of the stack and did not print it again. The rest is fine.
Autumn Pages That Made the Whole Fruit Thing Click
Fall printables and fruit of the Spirit belong together and I didn’t see it until I had both on the table at once. Harvest, gathering, things that took all summer to ripen. That’s the concept, sitting right there in pumpkin form, no lecture required.
We did one page a week through October and wrote a fruit name at the top of each in marker. By the fourth one my six-year-old was guessing which word came next. Not because he memorized a list. Because the pages went in order and kids track order better than they track meaning.
The gripe: it’s seasonal, so it dies in March. I print the whole run in September and I don’t pretend it’s a year-round set. Also two pages are almost entirely leaves, which is a lot of coloring for very little verse, and my kids abandoned both.
Cross Pages for the Weeks I Want Fewer Distractions
Sometimes I want a page with nothing on it but the shape and the words. No animals, no borders, no flowers crowding in. These are that. Symmetrical, clean, and the older kid can spend forty minutes on the patterning inside one cross without saying a word to anybody.
That quiet is where self-control lives, incidentally. I stopped explaining self-control and started noticing it out loud instead. You wanted to stop and you kept going. That’s it, said in passing, while she colors. She looks up, files it away, keeps coloring.
The gripe: there’s almost nothing here for the three-year-old. The designs assume patience and fine motor control she does not have yet, and she gave up on the first one in about ninety seconds. This is an older-kid set wearing a family-set label.
The 180-Page Pile I Ration Out One Fruit at a Time
A hundred and eighty pages is not something you print. It’s something you keep on the desktop and pull from for a year. I opened it expecting filler and found maybe two thirds usable, which for a pack this size is honestly a good ratio.
My system is boring and it works. Nine fruits, one per week, and each week I pick four or five pages from this pile that fit the word. Kindness week got the pages with two people in them. Peace week got the quiet landscapes. The kids never see the pile, only the small stack, so it never feels like homework.
The gripe: no index, no thumbnails sheet, nothing. You scroll a hundred and eighty pages to find the four you want, and you do it again next week because you won’t remember page numbers. I built my own contact sheet in an afternoon and I resent having had to.
Volume Two, or Why I Now Own Four of These
Same series, different pages, and I bought this one after the first pile started repeating on us. The overlap between volumes is smaller than I expected. Maybe a handful of near-duplicates across the two, which at this price I can live with.
This is the volume I raided for Sunday school. Sixteen kids, sixteen different pages, nobody comparing sheets and nobody claiming somebody copied. That alone justified it. Faithfulness week ran off this one because it has more of the story sequences, and stories are how you show a kid that faithful means somebody kept going for a long time.
The gripe: page margins are tight. My printer clipped the bottom line of text on about one in eight pages until I set it to fit-to-page, and then everything came out slightly small. Set your printer once and stop thinking about it.
The Volume I Keep for Sick Days and Long Car Rides
I don’t organize this one. It’s the emergency pile. Somebody’s home with a fever, or we’ve got two hours in the car, and I print fifteen random pages from here into a folder and hand it over.
There’s a version of parenting where every printable serves a lesson plan. That is not this house. Sometimes the win is that a bored child is quiet and there happens to be scripture under the crayon, and the fruit of the Spirit part happens later, on its own, when the words have been around long enough to feel familiar.
The gripe: quality across the volume is uneven. Some pages are clean vector line art and some look like they were traced at low resolution, and the soft ones print fuzzy no matter what you do. Flip through before you commit ink.
Volume Four Is Where the Gentleness Pages Hide
Gentleness was the fruit I could not find art for. Love has hearts, joy has smiles, peace has doves, and gentleness has nothing obvious, which is exactly why kids don’t get it. This volume has the most people-touching-people pages of the four, hands on shoulders, somebody helping somebody up, and those are gentleness whether the caption says so or not.
I printed six of them and we talked about what the hands were doing. Not what the word meant. What the hands were doing. The six-year-old got there himself and it stuck better than the two times I explained it.
The gripe: it’s the weakest of the four volumes overall, with more filler borders and decorative frames eating page space. If you’re only buying one from this series, don’t make it this one. If you’re buying for a specific fruit, this is the one with the pages you can’t get elsewhere.
One Hundred Ten Pages, and the One I’d Buy First
If somebody made me pick a single big pack, it’s this one. Smaller than the 180s, tighter editing, and the hit rate is noticeably higher. Less scrolling past pages I’d never print.
The verse typography is the reason. The letters are big and clean, so the six-year-old is actually coloring the words instead of a wall of tiny text he ignores. He colored the word patient inside a rainbow last week and then asked whether being patient counts if you’re annoyed the whole time. Yes, I said. That’s the only kind there is.
The gripe: a hundred and ten pages and only a couple lean toward the harder virtues. Love and joy are covered ten times over. Longsuffering, goodness, self-control, you’re improvising. That’s true of nearly every Bible coloring pack I’ve bought, but it’s worth saying out loud before you expect a fruit-of-the-Spirit curriculum in here.
Fifty-Four Pages That Fit a Sunday School Class Exactly
This is the classroom-sized one. Fifty-four pages means I can print the entire set, sleeve it, and keep a physical binder in the church closet without a second cartridge. That matters when you’re the substitute and you have no idea what supplies will be there.
The pages are simple, which in a room of sixteen kids is the point. Everybody finishes. Nobody’s still working when the parents arrive. I used the two-people pages for the week we talked about the scooter thing, because every kid in that room has a scooter story and none of them have a patience story until you connect the two.
The gripe: simple slides into plain. My eight-year-old finds these boring and she’s right. This is a five-and-under set that happens to be sized like a classroom resource. Buy it for the room, not for the kid who likes detail.
Forty Pages, Which Is Roughly One Real Month
Small pack, and I mean that as a compliment. Forty-odd pages is about what a family actually gets through before the kids want something new, and buying at this size means I’m not paying for a hundred and forty pages I’ll never open.
I keep this one in a folder by the door for the ten minutes before dinner when everybody is feral and I need hands occupied. Not a lesson. Just a page and a crayon and a verse in the corner where their eyes land.
The gripe: no theme, no order, no sequence. It’s a grab bag, so if you were hoping to walk a kid through the nine fruits in order you’ll be sorting it yourself. Also the file is one merged PDF with no individual pages, so printing page 23 means finding page 23 every single time.
The Hundred-Page Set With the Best Paper Behavior
I judge these packs on one dumb practical thing now: how they behave with markers. Most Bible coloring PDFs are drawn assuming crayons, and my kids gave up crayons around the time the eight-year-old discovered fine-tip markers. This set has enough white space that marker bleed doesn’t ruin the page next to it.
We used it for a homemade patience tracker. Colored one small page a day, taped them in a row down the hallway, and at the end of the week we looked at the row and talked about where each kid had waited for something. Seven pages, seven moments. The visual row did more than the conversation did.
The gripe: the covers and section dividers are included in the page count, which is a little cheeky. Real coloring pages come in under a hundred. Not a dealbreaker, just don’t buy this expecting exactly a hundred usable sheets.
I Am Verses That Ended Up on the Fridge, Not the Wall
These are affirmation-style prints, short I am statements paired with scripture, and I bought them for a bedroom wall and then never put them there. They live on the fridge instead, held up by that grape magnet, one at a time, swapped when it stops getting looked at.
One on the fridge beats twelve on a wall. Twelve becomes wallpaper in about four days. One gets read at breakfast because there’s nothing else to read while you wait for toast. I put the kindness one up the week after the quiet question and let it sit there for eleven days.
The gripe: the language is adult. Some of these read like something off a women’s devotional calendar, and a six-year-old will not parse I am rooted and established in love without help. I use maybe half the set with the kids and keep the rest for myself, which is not what I paid for but is not nothing either.
The Second Affirmation Set, and My Cheap Laminator
Different design run, same idea, and this is the one I laminated. Four cards on the kitchen table, kids pick one at breakfast, it goes back in the stack at night. Laminated because the three-year-old treats paper as a food group.
The short ones are the useful ones. I am loved. I am kept. Four words a kid can carry to school. The moment a card needs a comma it’s too long for the audience, and I’ve stopped apologizing for skipping those.
The gripe: the design is busy underneath the text, watercolor washes and florals, and on a color printer it eats an alarming amount of ink for something that ends up in a kid’s pocket. I printed the second batch in grayscale and honestly they read better. Cleaner. Cheaper. Slightly sad-looking on the table, which nobody but me has noticed.
Strips I Cut Up Into a Where-Was-I-Kind Tracker
This set has a layout that cuts well. That sounds like nothing and it’s the reason I use it most. Each verse sits in its own band with enough margin that a straight cut down the page gives you six clean strips instead of six pages with somebody’s descender sliced off.
So we made a tracker. Nine strips, one per fruit, taped down the side of the pantry door, and a kid gets to draw a small check next to one when they can say where it happened today. Not where they were good in general. Where, specifically, today. The six-year-old checked kindness after he handed over the scooter without being asked, and he found me to tell me about it, which is the entire mechanism.
The gripe: only about six of the nine fruits appear in this set at all. I hand-lettered the missing three on blank strips and they look worse than the printed ones, and my daughter pointed that out immediately.
The Last Affirmation Pack, Which Is Really for the Youth Group
My husband took this one. The tone sits older, more identity-language than nursery-language, and the fifteen-year-olds in his Wednesday group responded to it in a way my six-year-old never would. He printed a set, they picked one each, they went in wallets and phone cases.
I’m including it because families are not one age group. If you have a teenager and a toddler under the same roof, the toddler gets the fat outlines and the teenager gets a card that doesn’t feel like it was made for a nursery, and the same nine words end up covering both.
The gripe: for the little-kids audience this article is actually about, it’s close to useless. Buy it knowing that. It’s the strongest design of the four affirmation sets and the worst fit for a six-year-old, which is a frustrating combination to write about.
A Few Last Thoughts
If you’re starting from nothing, print one bold-line coloring set and one affirmation set, cut the second one into strips, and tape the strips somewhere the kids walk past forty times a day. That’s the shortest path. The coloring pages buy you quiet and put the words in their hands, the strips turn nine abstract nouns into a thing a kid can point at and check off. Everything else on this list is depth you can add later or skip forever. My own strips are crooked and one of them has jam on it.
The question I get most is how you explain longsuffering to a six-year-old, and my answer is that you don’t. You wait until he wants the scooter and his brother has it, and you say the word out loud right then, once, and you let the yard do the teaching. He will ask you something sideways about it a week later, like whether kindness means staying quiet, and you’ll answer badly, and that’s fine, because he’s the one thinking about it now instead of you. The printables just keep the words within reach until real life supplies the example. It always does. Usually before lunch.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I explain the fruit of the spirit to a young child?
Point at it when it happens. When my six-year-old waited his turn without being asked, I said that was patience, right then. Naming it in the moment does more than a whole lesson about the word.
Which fruit is hardest for kids to grasp?
Longsuffering, and it is not close. Self control they understand as a rule they are breaking. Gentleness they understand from how you touch the cat. Longsuffering needs a story, not a definition.
Is a fruit of the spirit chart worth it?
Only if it stays somewhere everyone walks past. Ours is on the fridge. The one I put in the hallway lasted a week before it was invisible.
