This past week I attended a great training with Kathy Villere, a speech-language pathologist who has worked with young children for many years. She gave us some really valuable information about how children develop language and vocabulary skills, and how this ties very closely into learning to read. Her talk will have to be an entirely separate post, but: she had some great props she uses with kids and shared with us some sites for finding great free clipart (the first 2 in the list below) that can be used for creating flannelbords, etc.
So, fellow flannel friday-ers, I thought it might be useful to compile some of the best sites for free downloadable art that can be used for flannelboards. Please let me know if I’ve missed any of your favorites!
FREE CLIPART SITES:
- OpenClipArt: Thousands of clipart illustrations, copyright-free for your use.
- MorgueFile: free photographs. I searched “monkey” and found 12 pages of photos, including the one to the right. Cute!
- Free Kids Clip Art by Phillip Martin: For non-profit use only, and education-focused. Super cute! Printable banners and certificates too!
- Discovery Education: Education-focused cartoon clipart
- Clkr.com: I’ve gotten a lot of animal images from here. The site bills itself as the “online royalty free public domain clipart.” I got my “5 clean and dirty pigs” design from here.
FREE PRINTABLE FLANNELBOARDS (print, laminate and use as-is or trace on to felt):
- Kizclub: Flannelboard pieces from popular picture books like Froggy Gets Dressed, Dear Zoo, Where’s Spot, Go Away Big Green Monster and many more!
- Making Learning Fun: Printables for books, like a paintstick version of Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, and Dog’s Colorful Day, and songs/rhymes like 5 Little Hotdogs and Itsy Bitsy Spider.
- DLTK’s Felt Board Templates: Not a ton of options here, but some nice ones, like Brown Bear Brown Bear and some generic farm characters. Also, fairy tale/rhyme flannel templates are here.
- Childcareland: A few cute ideas for flannelboards here, and at the end of several (but not all) of the posts there’s a link to patterns. I like the ice cream cone color match!
missmaryliberry.com 
Oh gosh, Sorry I didn’t see your comment earlier! Absolutely. Thanks for asking!
I would like to request permission to use one of your links on and activity sheet and to make the flannelboard to present at a conference. Here is the link:
https://missmaryliberry.wordpress.com/2011/07/29/flannel-friday-5-baby-penguins/
One suggestion I do have is to search for a coloring page or coloring sheet on whatever image you are looking for. This would allow you to give the image a personal touch without totally having to recreate it yourself. Again, great post!
What a great idea! I usually just use Microsoft clip art, so I will definitely check out these other websites.
For our puposes, then, I think it would be okay for us to say WHERE we got the clipart from (i.e. Microsoft Clipart) but not share pdf files of the actual clipart (unless it’s our own, original artwork). Folks can then go and search for the same artwork, if they’d like, on the website or on their own copy of MS.
I use Microsoft Word clipart a lot, but I recently found out my library doesn’t have permissions to redistribute it…which means most of my clipart files on my blog are going to have to come down. Whichever site you use, make sure it’s okay to remix, and okay that you redistribute!
Thanks for the great list! I Open Clip Art frequently, but had no idea about the other resources. Great job!
Great list, and thanks! I often just do a Google search and that’s as intentional as I get. The only thing I can think to add that might help some people, is that I often forget to check the clipart included in my Microsoft Suite. It doesn’t always have what I need, but quite often it does, and it’s nice because it’s vector art and I can print it really large if I need to–worth checking!
This is such a great post! I love Making Learning Fun and glad to see it made your list.