Best 20 Ten Commandments Printables for Kids
My eight-year-old asked me what “do not covet” means while we were standing in the checkout line at the grocery store, three people deep, candy rack right at his eye level. I said something about wanting what belongs to somebody else so much that it makes you unhappy. He thought about it for a second. Then he asked if that was the same as wanting the candy. Close enough, and no, I did not buy it.
I’m Rebecca. Three kids, eight, six and three, and a husband who runs the youth group at our church, so Exodus 20 comes up at our table more than you would guess. I also fill in for the little-kids Sunday school class whenever the regular teacher needs a Sunday off. Anything I print gets two tests: does it survive my own three, and does it survive a room full of other people’s kids who have had too much juice.
Here is how the commandments actually work in this house, because ten “do not” lines read out loud in a row is the fastest way to lose a six-year-old. One commandment a week, on a card, in words a kid would use. A tablet craft they cut out themselves. And straight answers on the hard ones, which I get to at the bottom. Below are sixteen files I use to build all of that, keepers and duds named. 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 Easter Bunny File I Bent Into a Commandment Reward Chart
I bought this for Easter and ended up using it in June, which tells you something. The kids get a sticker for each commandment they can say back in their own words, and the finished chart gets this printed across the top. Bunny, cross, pastel. It reads as a prize rather than a lesson, and that is exactly the job I needed done.
The line work holds up at full size and the transparent background dropped onto my chart template without a white box hiding behind it, which is not a given with PNG bundles.
The gripe: my eight-year-old wanted to know why there is a bunny at the cross, and I had nothing better than “people put bunnies on everything in spring.” If you have a literal kid, that question is coming. It is also PNG only, so there is no clean way to blow it up for a poster or send it to a cutting machine.
The Cover Card for Our Ring of Ten (Girls Only, Sadly)
Our memory cards live on a metal book ring hanging off the fridge handle, one commandment per card, and this is the top card. A girl with an open Bible, nothing else. It introduces the stack without putting a single rule on the front, which matters when there are ten rules right behind it.
Being an SVG, it cut cleanly on vinyl for the front of my daughter’s Sunday school folder, and it scaled down to card size without going to mush.
The gripe is sitting in the title. It is a girl. My six-year-old noticed inside a day and asked where the boy one was, and there is no boy one in this file. Mixed-age, mixed-gender houses are buying half a set here and will have to source the other half somewhere else.
Trust in Jesus, Printed Small, Taped Where the Arguing Happens
Commandment one in kid words is “God comes first, before anything else you love.” That sentence needs a picture beside it or it floats away. This is the picture. Clean type, nothing crowding the words.
I ran it at card size for the ring and again at postcard size for the inside of the pantry door, which is where the six-year-old goes to be mad in private.
The gripe: the lettering is script, and my six-year-old cannot read script. He recognizes the shape and recites from memory, which is not the same thing as reading it. Under seven, pair this with the same line typed in fat block letters, otherwise you are teaching a picture instead of the words.
The Sunflower Slogan I Keep for Myself and Do Not Hand to the Kids
“Faith it till you make it” is a mug line. It is cute, it is sunny, and it says something I do not want an eight-year-old absorbing in the middle of a list about keeping your word, because the point of that list is that none of it is a bluff.
So this one went inside my planner cover and nowhere near the kids’ wall. The sunflower art is genuinely warm, good yellows, and it prints without the color going muddy on plain paper.
The gripe is the message, not the file. Teaching older kids, skip it. Wanting something on your own desk after a Sunday that chewed you up, it does that fine. Buying it for a children’s lesson is a mistake I already made so nobody else has to.
Leopard Print Cross: The Teen Girls Loved It, My Card Ring Rejected It
Same He is Risen line as the plainer files, except the cross is filled with leopard print, and that one choice moves it out of Sunday school and into a teenager’s bedroom. My husband pulled it into a slide for youth group and it landed with the middle school girls on sight.
On our commandment ring it fails completely. Too much going on behind the letters, and small text over animal print at card size turns into a smear.
The gripe: the print is baked into the shape, so swapping it for a flat fill means repainting the whole thing in an editor. Fine if leopard is what you came for. Useless if you needed the cross by itself. It is also Easter wording on a file you will want in November, and the listing does not warn you about that.
The Plain Cross I Reach For When the Fancy Ones Are Too Loud
After the bunny and the leopard, this is the version that actually made it onto classroom material. Plain cross, plain words, nothing fighting for attention. It became the back of every card on our ring, so the stack looks like one set instead of ten unrelated printouts.
At two inches it stays crisp. At eight inches it also stays crisp, which I did not expect from a PNG.
The gripe: the palette is dusty and muted, and next to anything bright it looks faded. My three-year-old calls it “the gray one,” which is not the phrase you want a preschooler attaching to a cross. In a room full of primary colors this will be the page nobody looks at.
Daisies and Jesus Loves Me: What the Three-Year-Old Gets Instead of a Rule
My youngest does not get a commandment card. She gets this. Explaining “you shall not bear false witness” to somebody who is currently certain she owns a pet dragon is not a good use of a Tuesday.
The daisies are simple shapes and there is basically one sentence on the whole thing. She holds it, she says the sentence, she is part of the activity while the older two work through the actual list.
The gripe: this is the softest, most babyish file in the roundup, and my eight-year-old will not touch it. Fine by me, she is not the audience. But if you were hoping one file would stretch across all your kids, it is not this one. The flowers also crowd the text at small sizes, so print it big or crop it down.
True Story: The File That Made the Ninth Commandment Land
“You shall not bear false witness” is a mouthful. On our ring that card reads “tell the truth, even when it costs you.” This design says True Story next to a cross and a lamb, and my six-year-old connected the two on his own, which almost never happens without me steering.
It went on the ring at card size and again as a small sign taped to the bathroom mirror, which is where a certain someone rehearses his excuses.
The gripe: True Story is slang, and slang ages badly. In three years this may read the way a 2013 hashtag reads now. The lamb is also drawn with much more care than the lettering, so blown up large you start noticing the type is thin and slightly uneven beside it.
A Raccoon Handled the Covet Question Better Than I Did in That Checkout Line
After the grocery store I wanted the tenth commandment sitting on something a kid would look at twice. A raccoon does it. Raccoons take what is not theirs, every kid under ten already knows this, and the joke does half my explaining before I open my mouth.
Our card reads “be glad about what you have, not sad about what somebody else has,” with this raccoon beside it. My son asked for it back after Sunday school so he could keep it in his desk at home.
The gripe: the verse printed on the file has nothing to do with coveting, it is a general faith line, so I cropped the text off and added my own. Matching the image to the commandment means doing that same edit yourself. The raccoon earns it anyway.
God Is Good All the Time, Which Is How We Teach Commandment Three
“Do not take the Lord’s name in vain” turns into “God’s name is not a filler word, it is a name we handle carefully.” That stays abstract for a six-year-old, so we pair it with the opposite behavior: saying God is good on purpose, out loud, when something goes right.
This file lives above the light switch by our back door. It gets read maybe forty times a day by people who never decided to read it.
The gripe: the phrase is on roughly nine million church signs and this version does nothing new with it. Bold letters, small heart. If you already own three files saying something close, you own this one. Worth buying only if you need the exact lettering to match a set you started.
Be Strong and Courageous: The Card for the Kid Having the Hard Week
This one is not tied to any commandment. It is the card that comes out when doing the right thing is going to cost somebody something, which is most of the back half of the list. Give back the thing you took. Tell the teacher what really happened. Apologize first.
The art is plain enough for a boy’s room, which took me longer to find than it should have in a category buried in florals.
The gripe: it is one flat composition, so the phrase and the decoration will not come apart. I wanted the words alone on a paper strip for my son’s bookshelf and ended up retyping them in my own layout. The reference underneath is set tiny too, small enough to vanish at card size, and I want kids seeing where the words came from.
The Coffee One Is for Me and I Am Not Going to Pretend Otherwise
Jesus, a heart, coffee, unstoppable. This is not a children’s file. Nothing on it belongs on a commandment ring or a Sunday school wall.
It went on a tumbler. I use the tumbler on the mornings I am covering the little-kids class, which is the only defense I have.
The gripe, if you are shopping for kids’ material: this is the sort of listing that clogs a Christian printables search and eats your money if you buy off the thumbnail. It is adult merch art. The design itself is solid and the layered look prints well on light shirts, but if you came here for the Ten Commandments, close the tab. I am listing it because I bought it by accident and somebody should say so out loud.
A Blue Varsity Bow Got My Daughter Carrying Her Verse Cards
My eight-year-old will not carry anything that looks like Sunday school. She will carry anything with a bow on it this year. So the front of her card pouch has this file on it, the ten cards live inside, and she has not complained once in six weeks.
Blue, varsity stripe, the word Faith. It looks like what is on the other girls’ water bottles, which is the entire reason it works.
The gripe: it is a trend, and trends here last about one school year. I would not print it on anything permanent. It also aims squarely at girls again, so between this and the reading girl SVG you end up with a lopsided set unless you go hunting. My six-year-old got a plain cross on his pouch and informed me his was better.
The Colorful Sheet That Rescued Our Cardboard Tablets
We cut the two tablets out of gray cardboard from a shipping box, and by day two both had curled at the top corners like stale bread. They looked sad on the shelf. The kids stopped touching them.
Printing this on cardstock and gluing it to the back fixed both problems at once. The color gave them a reason to pick the tablets up again, and the heavier paper on one side pulled most of the curl flat. Do this at the start of the craft rather than as a repair, and cut the tablets from cardstock in the first place, not a box.
The gripe: the design is busy, so if you glue it to the front instead of the back you cannot read the commandments the kids wrote. Back only. The colors are also bright enough that my six-year-old wanted to color it in, and there is nothing on it to color, which caused a small argument.
Let Them See You in Me: The Card That Jumped to the Teenagers
I printed this for our hallway. My husband spotted it on the counter and worked it into his youth group lesson that same week, the first time anything out of my printer folder has crossed over to the teenagers.
For the little kids it works as the closing card on the ring. After ten rules, a card about what people should notice in you is a decent place to stop.
The gripe: the phrasing is inward and a little sophisticated. My six-year-old read it as “see you inside me” and we spent a few unhelpful minutes there. It needs a sentence of explaining every single time, which is the opposite of what a fridge card should need. Better for ten and up, or as something a parent reads aloud.
Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, and What I Actually Say About Commandment Seven
Here is the part you scrolled for. My kids have asked what adultery means. What I tell the eight-year-old: married people promise to belong to each other, and this commandment says keep that promise. It is true, it is complete enough for him, and it has never once produced a follow-up question at the table.
The six-year-old gets “keep your promises to your family” and wanders off. The three-year-old skips the card entirely. The rest of it waits, not because it is shameful, but because the fuller answer needs questions he has not asked yet, and my husband and I would rather give it on a walk than between two other kids at dinner.
This is the file I put beside that card, because the honest version of that conversation later starts with a kid believing his body was made on purpose. Psalm 139 wording, soft colors, an open Bible. The gripe: the text runs long in a thin serif, so at card size it turns into decoration. I print it half page or not at all, and for the ring I retyped the line in a fat font they can read from across the room.
A Few Last Thoughts
Shortest path if it is Thursday and you are teaching Sunday: print the plain cross for the card backs, the raccoon for commandment ten, and the colorful sheet for the tablet craft. Write the ten lines yourself in kid words on index cards, punch one hole, put them on a ring. That is one evening of work and it carries you ten weeks. Everything else here is decoration layered on top, and the decoration is the reason an eight-year-old picks the stack up at all.
The one thing I would do differently: we ran all ten in the first week, out loud, in order, and it went exactly how you would expect. Ten rules in a row sounds like a wall. One a week sounds like something you are getting through together, and by week six my son was the one asking which card came next. Our cardboard tablets are still curled at the corners. Still on the shelf. Nobody has thrown them out.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you teach the ten commandments without it sounding like a list of rules?
Pair each one with what it protects instead of what it forbids. Do not steal becomes people can trust each other. Kids argue less with a reason than with a rule.
What do I say about the commandment on adultery?
For little ones I say it means married people keep their promises to each other. That is honest and complete enough for eight. The fuller conversation belongs to a different age and probably a different parent-kid moment.
Should kids memorize all ten?
One a week works better than all ten at once. By the tenth week they can rattle off the early ones and you have had ten actual conversations instead of one recital.