Cartoon mother duck leading seven ducklings beside a winding pond with cattails and clouds

Mother Duck Leads Seven Ducklings by the Cattails

A smiling mother duck strides along the pond path while seven ducklings trail behind her near tall cattails and curving water.

Free to print for personal and classroom use. This coloring page is part of the Duck collection, made for ages 8–12 and drawn in a Cartoon style.

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🎨 How to color it

Color the mother duck golden yellow, the seven ducklings soft butter yellow, the cattails cocoa brown, and the winding pond pale blue. Use colored pencils for the narrow cattail leaves and duckling feet, then fill the wider water curves with smooth marker strokes. Try making each duckling’s bill a slightly different orange, as if their little parade has collected bits of sunset.

The story behind this coloring page

Tansy Counts the Ripples — Along the reed road, Tansy tapped one webbed foot after another and tried to count seven ripples before the family reached the tall brown cattails. Read the full story →

Along the reed road, Tansy tapped one webbed foot after another and tried to count seven ripples before the family reached the tall brown cattails. Plip, plip, plip went the pond beside her. Her brothers and sisters waddled in a loose line, and their mother hummed softly, feathers smelling of sun-warmed grass and clean water.

Tansy counted a ripple for a curved cloud, a ripple for a dragonfly’s silver dash, and a ripple for each cattail shadow lying thin across the pond. By six, her thoughts had run ahead of her feet. What if there were ripples too small to see? What if every blade of grass made one underground? “Wait,” she whispered, “I need one more.”

Then the seventh ripple arrived from nowhere—round, neat, and shining—right beside her toes. A tiny pond snail lifted its horns from a lily-smooth stone, as if it had been counting Tansy’s steps all along. Mother Duck smiled without stopping, and the ducklings marched on with the snail’s circle widening behind them. Next time you spot the reed road, can you find the place where Tansy counted one webbed foot after another?