Best 20 Noahs Ark Printables for Kids Bible Story Time
Fourth night in a row. My three year old hands me the same board book, ark on the cover, and says “this one” like we have never discussed it. The plastic animal set that came with the story lives in a shoebox under her bed and it is missing a giraffe, which we have all agreed to pretend is fine. One giraffe goes on the boat alone. She lines the rest up in twos on the blanket and counts them wrong every single time, and I let her, because she is three and the counting is the point, not the number.
I’m Rebecca. Three kids, eight and six and three, and a husband who runs the youth group at our church, so Bible stories are just background noise in this house most weeks. I also fill in for the little kids Sunday school class when the regular teacher needs a Sunday off. Noah is the story that always works with the small ones, animals two by two, a rainbow at the end, free counting and sorting practice built right in. It is also a story about a flood that killed almost everybody, and I have gotten tired of watching us all skip that part and hand the kids a cartoon boat. My eight year old asked me straight out last spring what happened to the people who were not on it. I did not have a good answer ready. I do now, sort of.
So here are sixteen printables I have actually run through the printer, some of them ark adjacent and some of them honestly not ark at all, because the ark folder in my downloads is thinner than the internet makes it look and half of what I use on ark night was bought for something else. I will tell you which is which. 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.
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 Coloring Stack I Print Before Ark Night Even Starts
This is my wind down pile. Not animals, not a boat, just flowers wrapped around verses with thick outlines, and I print eight or ten of them on a Saturday so there is always something on the kitchen table. After the story, when the three year old is still wound up about the giraffe situation, a page like this gets her sitting down without a fight.
The line weight is the reason I keep buying floral sets over cutesy ones. Fat outlines mean a toddler stays roughly inside them and feels like she finished something. My six year old gets letters big enough to color the words themselves instead of squinting at them.
The gripe is real though. A few of these pages let the flowers crowd the verse until the text is decoration, and if you are trying to get a kid to read the words that is backwards. I hand those to the youngest and save the clean ones for the reader. Also, cardstock or nothing. Regular paper curls under marker.
A One Line Drawing for the Sunday School Teacher Who Keeps Showing Up
This is a continuous line piece, one unbroken stroke making a figure with a Bible. It is elegant in a way almost nothing else in the Christian printable market is, and I bought it as a thank you gift for the woman whose class I cover.
I put it on a plain tote. Took about twenty minutes including the part where I ironed it crooked and had to peel it back up.
Here is the honest part: this is not for kids and it is not for ark night. Children cannot color a single line drawing, there is nothing to fill in, and my six year old looked at it and asked what it was. You also need a cutting machine to get the good version of it. Without one you are printing a line drawing on paper and calling it art, which is fine, but know that going in.
The Shepherd Set That Fills the Gap Where the Ark Animals Stop
Cartoon Jesus with sheep, round and soft, the exact style a three year old points at and says the animal name out loud. I use these on ark night as the follow on, because once she has sorted her animals two by two she wants more animals and the ark set is done.
Sheep also do the counting thing. I print two sheets, cut the sheep apart, and she pairs them up on the floor the same way she does the plastic ones. It costs me five minutes with scissors and buys twenty minutes of quiet.
My complaint is the range. It is sheep. That is the animal. If you were hoping for a barnyard you will be disappointed, and pairing this art style with a more realistic set on the same worksheet looks like two different projects taped together. Also worth saying plainly: this depicts Jesus as a cartoon character, and some families would rather not. Mine is fine with it. Yours might not be.
Black and White Esther Stamps, Which Taught Me Something About the Flood
These are line art stamps, outlines meant to be colored or dropped into a worksheet. Esther, not Noah, so let me explain why it is here.
Esther is the story where I first figured out how to tell kids the hard parts without lying and without nightmares. You say what happened in short flat sentences and you stop talking. No dramatic voice, no softening it into a joke. When my eight year old asked about the people outside the ark, that is what I used. The water came and they died, and God was grieved about it, and He promised never again, and that is what the rainbow is. Short sentences. Then I stopped talking and let her sit with it.
The drawback is age. Esther goes over a three year old’s head completely, and even my six year old only tracks about half of it. These also come as outlines at whatever size the file wants, so you will be resizing before printing or you get one giant queen per page.
The Colored Version of the Same Story, and When I Reach for It Instead
Same Esther artwork, already colored. I bought both sets, which was probably one purchase too many, and I have a rule now about which one comes out.
Colored art goes on anything the kids are not supposed to work on. Story cards, a bulletin display, the little visual I hold up while talking. Line art goes to the table. Mixing that up means handing an eight year old a finished picture and watching her lose interest in four seconds.
So the honest note is redundancy. If your budget only stretches to one, take the stamps, because a kid can color those and you can always color one yourself for display. Buying both only makes sense if you are also teaching a class and need the ready made version on a Sunday morning when you have eleven minutes to prep.
Counting Practice Hiding in a Loaves and Fishes Outline
Five loaves, two fish. That is a counting worksheet that somebody already wrote for me, and it sits right next to the ark for the same reason: small numbers a little kid can hold in her head.
I print the loaves and fish, cut them out, and we count them into a basket. Then we count them again wrong. Then again. My three year old has now told me there were six fish, which I am not correcting yet.
What drags is the crowd art. Some of these pages are a whole hillside of tiny people with faces the size of a pencil tip, and a marker destroys that in one stroke. I use the isolated loaves and fish and mostly leave the crowd scenes in the folder. If you want the miracle itself illustrated, this works. If you want something a four year old can color, stick to the individual pieces.
Same Miracle, Color Version, Good for the Kid Who Will Not Color
The prefilled companion to the stamp set. Bright, flat colors, ready to drop into a handout.
My middle kid does not color. He never has. He will sit through a story if there is something to look at, and finished art is what he actually wants, so this set exists in my folder specifically for him and for the Sunday school kid who shoves the crayons away.
One annoyance nobody mentions on the listing page: the colors here do not exactly match the palette in the other feeding sets I own, so if you put a colored fish next to a colored loaf from a different pack on the same page, the blues fight. Small thing. It bothered me enough to redo a worksheet, so I am telling you.
A Christmas Sticker That Ended Up on the Bathroom Window in August
We have a rainbow on the bathroom window made of stickers. It started as an ark project, seven stripes, and it has been slowly colonized by whatever else the kids have gotten their hands on since. There is now a manger scene in the middle of the rainbow. It is August.
I am not going to defend the theology of that arrangement. What I will say is that a sticker file is the lowest effort thing on this whole list. Print, cut, hand it over, done, no cardstock, no laminating, no negotiation about who gets the good scissors.
The catch is season and supplies. This is a Christmas graphic and it will sit unused for most of the year unless your kids are like mine and do not care. And to get an actual sticker you need sticker paper, and to get a clean edge you need a cutting machine or a very patient hand. Cut it out with kid scissors and it looks cut out with kid scissors.
The Basketball One My Eight Year Old Picked Over Everything Else
I showed her a folder of maybe thirty designs to pick a shirt from. She picked the basketball hoop. Not the rainbow, not the animals, not one single thing I would have guessed.
That is the whole reason it is on this list. Somewhere between six and eight the sweet ark art stops working and the kid wants something that looks like the shirts other kids wear. If you have an older sibling sitting through ark night for the third time out of politeness, this is what buys their goodwill.
Criticism, and it is not small: the slogan is thin. Jesus always wins is not a sentence that survives a follow up question, and my daughter has asked follow up questions. It is also PNG only, so you are doing heat transfer or nothing, no vinyl cut version included. And it has zero to do with Noah. I am not pretending otherwise.
Retro Hearts for the Kid Who Is Done With Cute Animals
Groovy lettering, seventies palette, hearts. Aimed at the same age bracket as the basketball design and doing the same job, which is keeping a big kid in the room.
I printed one as a sticker for my daughter’s water bottle. It survived a summer of being knocked off the counter, which is the only durability test I run.
Two honest problems. First, that orange and brown palette does not sit next to anything else in this article. Put it on a page with soft pastel ark art and it looks like a mistake. Second, the wording is vague enough that it says almost nothing. It is a vibe, not a verse. I use it as decoration and I do not pretend it is teaching anybody anything.
Easter Words in the Middle of an Ark Article, and Why I Kept It
He is risen indeed. Wrong season, wrong story, and I still print it, because the ark and the empty tomb are the two places where my kids first understood that God does something about the mess rather than just watching it.
The lettering is clean and it reads from across a room, which matters if you are sticking it on a classroom door. I made a set of four and taped them along the hallway at church last spring.
The practical downside is obvious. It lives in a folder eleven months of the year. If you are buying one file this month for ark night, do not make it this one. Add it in February when you are already thinking about Easter and it will earn its keep then.
Stained Glass Colors That Do What Our Window Rainbow Does
This is the closest thing on the list to what the ark story actually ends with. Light coming through color. That is the connection I make out loud with my kids, and it is not a stretch, it is the same idea.
We taped a printed version next to the sticker rainbow on the bathroom window. Morning sun hits it around seven and the six year old announced it was glowing, which it was, a little.
Here is the thing the listing will not tell you: printed on regular paper this is flat and dull. You need vellum, or transparency film, or a very light paper held right against the glass, and even then it is nothing like real glass. Manage the expectation before you show a kid, because the version in your head is better than the version that comes out of the printer.
One Word Big Enough for a Six Year Old to Sound Out
Hallelujah. One word, large, cut file. My six year old is at the stage where he reads long words by attacking them one chunk at a time out loud, and a big single word on a wall gives him something to attack every time he walks past.
I cut it in gold vinyl and put it above the light switch in the hallway. It took three tries because I weeded the middle of the letters wrong twice.
The honest catch is the letterforms. Script is hard for early readers. The connected letters that make it look nice on a wall are exactly what makes a six year old stall out, and mine needed help the first four or five times before it clicked. If your kid is younger than that, this is decoration for you, not reading practice for them.
The Quilt Cross That Is Really for Grown Up Craft Night
Fine detail, patterned blocks, florals inside the shapes. Beautiful file, genuinely, and I want to be clear that I am the one who wanted it, not the kids.
I made a card with it for my mother in law. The detail holds up at small sizes, which is rare, most busy files turn to mush under about four inches.
But do not hand this to a child expecting a coloring page. The shapes are too small for anything wider than a fine tip pen, my six year old covered a third of it in one pass with a marker and then got frustrated, and that frustration is on me for giving it to him. This is an adult project for an evening after bedtime. Buy it knowing that and it is fine.
The Teacher Gift I Print in September and Forget by October
A classroom themed design aimed at church and school teachers. I print it on cardstock, write a note on the back, and hand it to the woman who runs the little kids room.
It does the job. She put last year’s on the shelf by the door and it is still there, which is more than I can say for most of what I make.
The limitation is that it is text heavy and adult facing. There is nothing here for a kid to do. It will not appear on ark night, it will not entertain a three year old for eleven seconds, and if you are buying files to use with children this one is not it. I keep it in a separate folder labeled gifts so I stop scrolling past it looking for something to print.
Goldfish, Which My Three Year Old Insists Were on the Ark
She is very firm about this. The fish were on the boat. I have explained twice now that the fish were arguably having the best week of anybody, and she is unmoved, and honestly it is the funniest thing to come out of four nights of the same story.
So these cartoon goldfish get printed on ark night specifically so she can put them on the boat. Round, friendly, bright, and small enough that I can fit six on a page and cut them apart fast.
The set is thin though. A couple of poses, not much variation, and once you have printed them twice you have seen everything in the file. It is also cartoon Jesus adjacent, same caveat as the sheep set. Cheap, cheerful, does one job. I would not build a lesson around it, but it did settle an argument about fish, so.
A Few Last Thoughts
Shortest path if you are starting from nothing tonight: one coloring set, one animal set you can cut apart, and the stained glass file if you have anything translucent to print on. That covers the three things ark night actually needs, something to color while you talk, something to count in twos on the floor, and something with color and light at the end so the rainbow is not just a word you said. Everything else here, the Esther stamps, the teacher gift, the basketball shirt, the quilt cross, is for a different night or a different kid. Skip it until you need it. My printer is out of cyan half the time anyway and nobody has noticed.
On the flood part, since that is the question I get and the one I got wrong the first time. I do not skip it and I do not dress it up. Short sentences, flat voice, then stop talking. The water came, most people died, God was grieved, He promised never again, the rainbow is the promise. My eight year old sat with that for about a day and came back with two more questions, which is what you want, because a kid who asks again is a kid who was told the truth the first time. The little ones do not need any of that yet. My three year old is on night five, she is going to line up her animals in twos and count them wrong, one giraffe is still going on that boat by himself, and the rest of it will keep until she asks.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I tell the Noahs ark story honestly to small children?
Say that people were hurting each other and God was sad about it, and that he kept Noah and the animals safe. That is true and a four-year-old can hold it. The harder parts land better when they are older and asking the questions themselves.
What ages like ark printables most?
Two through six, easily. Animals in pairs give you counting, sorting and matching without calling it a lesson, which is why the story keeps working long after they know how it ends.
Do I need special paper for these?
Cardstock for anything you cut out, regular paper for coloring. If you plan to hang a rainbow on a window, print it on the lightest paper you have so the light comes through.