Coloring Sheets to Teach Kids About Smoking

Young children can learn the dangers and consequences of smoking at an early age by using coloring and worksheets. Coloring sheets show children the damage smoking does to a smoker's body and the environment. In addition to coloring the lungs of a smoker next to the lungs of a nonsmoker, children can draw pictures of activities to do instead of smoking or how express how a realistic cigarette advertisement might look.

The World's Fastest Clown offers a coloring sheet that depicts a person, with visible lungs. The lungs are separated into sides A and B, and children are instructed to color the A section as if it were a healthy lung and the B section like a smoker's lung. A nonsmoker's lung is pink because it has good blood flow and is healthy. To color the smoker's lung, the children use gray and black to represent the nicotine and tar that has built up.

Teacher Vision offers children a one-page worksheet that depicts what smoking does to a smoker's lungs, mouth and nose. The diagram explains how smoking harms the delicate cells of the nose and tongue. A person's profile is pictured on the left side of the worksheet, and a smaller picture of a person's mouth and tongue is on the bottom right. The taste buds responsible for tasting sweet, sour, salty and bitter are marked out on the tongue.

Smoking does not just affect the smoker. Teacher Vision, makers of the worksheet depicting pollution inside the body, also produce a free worksheet with pictures of things that create pollution outside the body. Children can color in the different causes of pollution, including an airplane, factory, car, cigarette and spaceship, and fill in the missing letters to name each object in the space below the picture.

In Utah, the Anne Arundel County Department of Health runs the Learn to Live Healthy program, including an anti-smoking website called Smoking Stinks with a four-page worksheet to teach children about smoking. Pictures include a mouth with gums and teeth, a worksheet on what the child's body would say about breathing second-hand smoke, and space to draw a picture of something fun to do instead of using tobacco.