Palm Sunday Coloring Pages open Holy Week with one of the most joyful and visually rich stories in the Christian calendar – and this is one of the collections I reach for first every spring at ColoringPagesOnly.com. With 40+ free pages covering Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem, the crowds waving palm branches, the disciples, the humble donkey, and the “Hosanna!” shouts that rang through the city gates, this collection is made for Sunday school classrooms, home devotionals, and families who want to spend Holy Week with something in their hands as well as their hearts.
Every page is completely free – download as PDF to print or color online in your browser with one click. No sign-up, no cost.
What Is Palm Sunday?
Palm Sunday is the first day of Holy Week – the week in the Christian calendar that leads from Jesus’ arrival in Jerusalem all the way through Good Friday and Easter Sunday. It falls on the Sunday before Easter each year, and it marks one of the most dramatic and beloved moments in the Gospels: Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey while crowds lined the road, waving palm branches and shouting “Hosanna!”
The story is told in all four Gospels – Matthew 21, Mark 11, Luke 19, and John 12 – with each account adding its own details, but all of them capturing the same essential image: a city stirred, a crowd celebrating, and Jesus at the center of it all, arriving not with the power of a conquering army but with the quietness of a man on a humble animal.
Why palm branches? In first-century Jerusalem, palm branches were a symbol of victory, triumph, and celebration – they had been used in Jewish festivals and as signs of joy for generations. When the crowd cut branches from the palm trees and laid them on the road, they were making a royal carpet. They were treating this arrival as the entrance of a king.
Why a donkey? This is one of the most theologically significant details of the story. Centuries earlier, the prophet Zechariah wrote that the king of Jerusalem would come “riding on a donkey” – not on a war horse, which was the symbol of military power and conquest, but on a donkey, which was the symbol of peace. Jesus riding a donkey was a deliberate fulfillment of that prophecy, and the people who knew their scriptures would have recognized exactly what it meant.
What does “Hosanna” mean? The word comes from the Hebrew Hoshia-na – literally “Save us, we pray!” or “Please save!” Over centuries, it had also become a shout of praise, a word that held both prayer and celebration at the same time. When the crowd shouted “Hosanna in the highest!” they were doing both: praising the one they believed had come to save them, and asking for that salvation all at once. The two Hosanna pages in this collection – with the word rendered in bold, joyful lettering – are some of the most popular pages for classroom bulletin boards during Holy Week.
What’s Inside the Palm Sunday Coloring Collection
The procession pages – Jesus Riding on Donkey, Jesus On Donkey, Jesus into Jerusalem On Donkey, Jesus Palm Sunday, Jesus Greeted On Palm Sunday, Jesus enters Jerusalem, and the broader Palm Sunday scene pages – are the heart of the collection. These are the images the story is built around, and they range from simpler compositions suited for preschoolers (the Palm Sunday for Kids and Palm Sunday for Children pages) to more detailed crowd scenes that give older colorists a full city backdrop to work with.
The symbol pages – Palm Leaf, Palm Leaf to Print, the standalone palm branch designs – are practical pages that go beyond coloring. Sunday school teachers use these constantly: printed on green cardstock and cut out, they become the palm branches children wave during a Palm Sunday processional re-enactment. The Child on Palm Sunday page, which shows a child figure participating in the celebration, bridges the historical scene and a child’s sense of personal connection to the story beautifully.
The “Hosanna” pages – Hosanna and Hosanna for Jesus – feature the word itself as the central design element, surrounded by palm imagery. These are the pages that work best as bulletin board displays, card-making templates, or classroom banners. Color them in greens and golds, and they look genuinely festive hung on a wall during Holy Week.
The devotional pages – Palm Sunday Bible, Bible Palm Sunday, Palm Sunday Lesson Sheet – are designed with religious education in mind. These pages connect the visual imagery to scripture and work well as take-home materials after a Sunday school lesson or a family devotional time.
The Chibi Palm Sunday page is worth calling out separately: it renders the Palm Sunday story in a chibi art style – the large-headed, expressive Japanese illustration format – and it is one of the most popular pages with children ages 6–10 who respond immediately to that style. It tells the same story with the same reverence but in a visual language that younger kids find instantly engaging.
Coloring Tips for Palm Sunday Pages
Palm Sunday has one of the most consistent and evocative color palettes of any Holy Week theme, and working within it makes the finished pages feel genuinely connected to the story.
Palm branches are the dominant green of this collection, and getting that green right matters. The fronds of a palm tree are a deep, saturated tropical green – not the soft spring green of new grass, not the cool blue-green of pine, but a rich, full-bodied mid-green with yellow warmth in the light areas. On the standalone Palm Leaf pages, build the color by starting with a medium green base and adding darker green shadows along the center spine of each frond, with lighter yellow-green at the tips. On the crowd scene pages, vary the greens slightly across different palm branches so they don’t all look identical.
Jerusalem’s architecture and landscape call for warm earth tones – sandy ochre, pale limestone cream, terracotta, and dusty golden-brown. The city walls, the road, the steps, and the buildings in the background of the procession pages should all feel sun-warmed and ancient. Avoid cool grays and cool whites, which will make the setting feel more modern and less historical.
Jesus’s robes follow the traditional iconographic palette: white or cream robes (the outer garment) over a blue or red inner robe, depending on the artistic tradition the illustration follows. On most of our pages, the blue-and-white combination reads as the most recognizable and reverential. Use a soft, warm white rather than a stark, brilliant white – it reads as cloth rather than paper.
The crowd gives you the most color freedom in the whole collection. The people lining the road would be wearing the full range of first-century Middle Eastern clothing – warm reds, deep blues, sandy yellows, burnt oranges, earthy greens. Let the crowd be colorful and varied. This is a celebration, and the visual energy of many colors in the crowd contrasts beautifully with the relative simplicity of Jesus and the donkey at the center.
The donkey is a warm gray-brown – a light, soft gray with warm undertones, not cold blue-gray. The area around the nose and eyes tends to be slightly lighter. Keep the coloring gentle and simple; the donkey is a supporting character and should feel humble against the color of the crowd and the landscape.
For the Hosanna pages, deep jewel-toned greens for any palm imagery, with the word “Hosanna” itself in warm gold, bright red, or rich royal blue. These pages are designed to be displayed, so give them the same care you’d give a piece of art meant for a wall.
5 Activities to Do With Your Palm Sunday Pages
Stage a Palm Sunday processional. Print the Palm Leaf and Palm Leaf to Print pages on green cardstock, cut out the branches, and have children wave them while walking through the house or classroom – just as the crowds did in Jerusalem. While they walk, tell the story from the Gospels: Jesus arriving on the donkey, the crowd spreading cloaks on the road, the shouts of “Hosanna!” ringing out. Children who physically re-enact this moment remember it in a completely different way than children who just read or hear about it.
Create a Holy Week timeline banner. Print and color the Palm Sunday pages, then pair them with pages from the Easter and Good Friday collections to create a visual timeline of Holy Week – Palm Sunday entry, the Last Supper, Good Friday, Easter morning. Hang them in sequence across a wall or a hallway. A child who can see the whole arc of Holy Week laid out visually, from the “Hosanna!” of Sunday to the “He is risen!” of Easter, understands the story’s shape in a way that a single lesson rarely achieves.
Make Palm Sunday greeting cards. Print and color the Hosanna pages or the simpler Palm Sunday designs on cardstock, fold them in half, and write a Palm Sunday message inside. The traditional greeting in many Christian communities is “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!” – the same words the crowd shouted as Jesus entered Jerusalem. Sending a hand-colored card with that greeting to a grandparent, a pastor, or a friend in the congregation is a small act of connection that the recipient will genuinely appreciate.
Build a Palm Sunday scene. Color and cut out the figures from the procession pages – Jesus, the disciples, the crowd members, the donkey – and mount them on craft sticks or fold tabs at their bases so they stand upright. Use a shoebox or a piece of green-and-brown construction paper as the road into Jerusalem, add some cut-out palm branches to the sides, and arrange the figures to recreate the scene. Children who build the scene themselves and can move the figures around are engaging with the story as active participants, not just observers.
Color the same page twice – before and after learning. Print two copies of one of the crowd scene pages. Give children the first one before you tell the story of Palm Sunday and ask them to color it however they like. Then tell the full story – the prophecy of Zechariah, why Jesus chose a donkey, what “Hosanna” means, and why palm branches. Then give them the second copy and ask them to color it again with what they now know. Compare the two finished pages together. This simple exercise shows children that the same image means more when you understand its story, and it’s a natural conversation starter about what they learned.
Download Your Free Palm Sunday Pages Today!
All 40+ Palm Sunday Coloring Pages are completely free – download as PDF to print at home or color online in your browser. No account needed, no cost. Whether you’re preparing a Sunday school lesson for this weekend, looking for a Holy Week activity to do with your kids at home, or simply want to spend some quiet time coloring your way through one of the most meaningful stories in the Christian faith, we hope this collection is exactly what you were looking for.
Share your finished pages with us on Facebook and Pinterest at ColoringPagesOnly.com. We especially love seeing how Sunday school classes use these pages together!
