Free Printable Bookmarks for Kids

A Bookmark They Made Is a Bookmark They Use

Children lose bookmarks at a remarkable rate, and a bought one is no loss at all when it goes. One they coloured in themselves, with their own name down the middle of it, tends to stay in the book — and the small ceremony of moving it forward each night turns out to be a decent reason to open the book in the first place. That is really what these are for. The bookmark is an excuse.

Everything prints as outline only. The name, the doodles at each end, the border: all hollow, all waiting to be filled in. Nothing arrives finished, so there is nothing to be passively received.

Print on Card If You Possibly Can

This is the one thing that decides whether a paper bookmark survives. On ordinary 80gsm printer paper it goes soft in a few days and creased in a week. On 160gsm or card it lasts a term. If your printer will not take card, print the sheet twice and glue the two copies back to back once they are coloured — the result is stiffer than a single sheet of card and has a coloured side facing each way.

Colour First, Cut Second

Always. A full sheet is easy to hold still and easy to lean on; three loose strips slide about under a crayon and get bent. The cut lines are dashed rather than solid for the same practical reason: a child colouring a solid border tends to treat it as part of the picture and colour along it, and then the scissors have nowhere obvious to go.

Once cut, punch the hole with an ordinary hole punch and thread a ribbon or a loop of wool through it. It is the step children like most, and a bookmark with a tail sticking out of the top of a book is much harder to lose.

A Class Set, or a Party Table

Type a different name, print, repeat. Thirty personalised bookmarks take about ten minutes to produce and cost whatever your paper costs, which makes them one of the better returns available on a wet afternoon. At a party they work the same way place cards do, except the guests take them home and use them.

More Free Printables

The printable reading log is the obvious pairing: a bookmark to keep their place and a log to write the title in when they finish. The name coloring page generator prints the same name at full page size, and there are free coloring pages across every subject we draw, from unicorns to the whole alphabet.

And Something Worth Bookmarking

A bookmark with their name on it works because children respond to their own name in print. So does what we actually make: personalized children’s books where your child is the hero of the story, illustrated from their photo, with their name running through every page of it.