Every Charlottesville parent knows the specific weather forecast that ruins a Saturday. Rain moving in around ten, sticking around all day, no chance of the playground drying out before dinner. Or the January stretch where it’s too cold and gray to be outside and everyone in the house has watched enough television to feel a little bit sick about it.
We made these for exactly those days.
Bumble, our bee, has been part of CharlottesvilleFamily since long before he had his own activity sheets. Over the years our team has drawn up a whole collection of coloring pages, mazes, puzzles, and nature scavenger hunts featuring him, and we’ve kept them free for local families the entire time. No signup, no email, no catch. Click any sheet below, print it, and you’re done.
They’re also small enough to matter in a practical way. Slide a few onto a clipboard and toss it in the car, and you have something for the twenty minutes you’re waiting outside a dance class at Barracks Road, or the wait for a table on a busy Saturday morning. Parents have told us they keep a stack in the glove box. That’s about the highest compliment a printable can get.
What’s in the Collection
The coloring pages are the simplest place to start, especially for younger kids who mostly want a crayon and a clear surface. There are several Bumble scenes to choose from, sized for standard letter paper so they’ll come out of any home printer without fuss.
The mazes step things up a little. One sends Bumble hunting for pirate treasure, which has been a favorite with the four to seven crowd for years. Older kids who blow through a maze in ninety seconds usually do better with the crossword puzzle or the find the differences sheet, both of which take real attention and buy you noticeably more time.
There’s a matching game, a hide and seek page where Bumble is tucked into a busy scene, and a cut and assemble puzzle that requires scissors and a bit of patience. That last one is a good rainy afternoon project rather than a five minute filler.
And then there are the nature scavenger hunts, which are our favorites because they’re meant to leave the house with you.
The Scavenger Hunts are Built for Our Trails
A scavenger hunt sheet is only as good as the place you take it. Ours were designed with Central Virginia in mind, so the things kids are looking for are things they’ll actually find here.
Ivy Creek Natural Area is probably the single best pairing. The trails are flat and forgiving, the loop is short enough for little legs, and there’s enough variety in the woods and along the field edges that kids fill in most of the sheet without much prompting. The Rivanna Trail works well too, particularly the stretches near Riverview Park where you get water, woods, and open ground in the same walk.
Darden Towe Park is a good choice when you want a scavenger hunt and a playground in the same trip, which is often the real requirement. Crozet Park is the same idea for families out west. And if you want the version with a bigger payoff, take a sheet along a walk at Sugar Hollow or up to Carter Mountain and let the view be the reward at the end.
If you’re looking for more trails to try, our guide to kid-friendly hikes near Charlottesville has options sorted by age and difficulty, and our playgrounds guide covers where to land when the hike is over.
The Newest Sheet: Bumble’s Bee City Activity Page
Charlottesville is a Bee City, which means the city has made a formal commitment to expanding pollinator-friendly habitat, cutting back on pesticides, and helping people understand why any of that matters. We partnered with the City of Charlottesville’s Office of Sustainability to make Bumble an activity sheet about it.
It’s a two-pager. One side has bee facts that kids repeat at dinner for weeks, a maze, and a craft corner with instructions for building a bee waterer out of a shallow dish and a handful of marbles. The other side has a guide to the native flowers that are easiest to grow with little hands, including sunflower, black-eyed Susan, purple coneflower, lanceleaf coreopsis, and wild bergamot, plus a word search.
The bee waterer craft takes about four minutes and costs nothing if you already have marbles or pebbles in the house. Spread them across the bottom of a saucer, add water until the tops of the stones still peek out, and set it outside near flowers. The stones give bees a place to land and drink without getting wet. Kids check on it obsessively for the first week, which is the whole point.
If your family gets into the planting side of it, our Home and Garden section has more on gardening with kids, butterfly gardens, and what actually grows well in our zone. You might also check out all of our environmentally friendly content in our Relocation Guide too.
For Teachers and Homeschool Families
These sheets are free to print and use in classrooms, co-ops, church programs, library groups, and scout meetings. Print as many copies as you need. We only ask that you leave the CharlottesvilleFamily mark on the page so other families can find their way back to the rest of the collection.
Teachers across Albemarle and Charlottesville city schools have used the scavenger hunts for outdoor learning days, and the Bee City sheet fits neatly into pollinator and habitat units. Homeschool families tell us the puzzles work well as morning warm-ups.
Questions parents ask
Yes. There’s no signup, no email required, and no account to create. Click the sheet you want and the PDF downloads.
A standard home printer and letter-size paper. Black and white is fine for the coloring pages, mazes, and puzzles. The Bee City sheet has color on it, but it still prints legibly in grayscale if your color cartridge has given up.
Roughly three to ten. The coloring pages and simpler mazes work for preschoolers. The crossword, find the differences, and word search sheets suit early elementary through about fourth grade.
Absolutely. Print freely for any classroom, camp, library, or group setting.
Ivy Creek Natural Area, the Rivanna Trail, Darden Towe Park, and Crozet Park all work well. Anywhere with a mix of woods and open space will do.
More Free Things While You’re Here
If printables are your kind of thing, a few of our other free resources are worth a look. Our Events Calendar is updated constantly with what’s happening around Charlottesville and Albemarle this weekend. Our free weekly newsletter, Out and About, lands in your inbox with curated picks so you’re not hunting for plans on a Thursday night. And our Bumble’s Birthday Club sends your child a little something from local businesses in their birthday month, which is a nice thing to have set up and forget about.
We hope you enjoy these free printable coloring pages for kids and activity sheets all highlighting Bumble, our lovable CharlottesvilleFamily bee!
