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!
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