Between the Lines: Colourable Worksheets and the Inclusive Classroom
By: Nicky De Proost
Introduction
I have a confession to make: one of the brightest moments in my teaching career did not happen in a classroom, a seminar room, or even within respectable shouting distance of a university. It happened at a Dungeons & Dragons table, sometime between initiative rolls and someone trying to negotiate with a gelatinous cube.
One of my players—brilliant, imaginative, and distractible in the way only truly gifted people are—was having a spectacularly difficult time paying attention. She drifted in and out of the session like a bored Victorian ghost. I’d set the scene; she’d look riveted; soon after all characters were already forgotten. I’d explain a rule; she’d nod with great seriousness; thirty seconds later she’d ask me to explain the same rule again. By mid-game, her character sheet looked less like a document of heroic destiny and more like the aftermath of a biro explosion. Her ability scores were buried under swathes of ink splotches, spirals, stick figures, and what I suspect was meant to be a dragon wearing a hat.
For a while, I took this personally. Surely it was a sign of my failure as a storyteller. Surely no one would doodle that much if the narrative was truly gripping. But eventually it dawned on me that this wasn’t disinterest. This was simply how her focus worked: the hands needed something to do so the mind could listen. And the character sheet was the unfortunate victim in all of this.
At the next session, I tried an experiment. I reprinted her character sheet, highlighted the bits that mattered, and handed her an actual colouring page along with a handful of coloured pencils. She accepted them politely, the way one accepts a free sample in a shop, and then… she coloured. She listened. She participated. She remembered events from the session with forensic clarity. By the end of the evening, she had completed three full pages of fantasy line-art and missed very little.
That, inconveniently for my sense of professionalism, was when I realised something important: being a Dungeon Master has far too much in common with being a teacher. You orchestrate attention. You build structure. You take a system that looks terrifyingly complex and make it feel navigable. And sometimes, the difference between chaos and comprehension is as simple as giving someone’s hands a task.
Naturally, I nicked the idea for my classroom.
So what does this actually look like?
In practical terms, the idea is deceptively simple. It’s just a worksheet: the same grammar explanations, the same example sentences, the same space for students to write, but with line art threaded through it.
At first it was only the occasional illustration in the margin, nothing glamorous. I made them in Canva, armed with a basic template and a collection of free vector illustrations scavenged from the more respectable corners of the internet. The process was wonderfully unsophisticated: drop in the grammar explanations, add a margin doodle of a fox or a teacup, nudge the text box so it didn’t sit on anyone’s tail, and call it a day.
Over time the illustrations settled into themes, and the themes began to give the worksheet its own atmosphere, a quiet little world for the grammar to live in. A unit on modal verbs sprouted forest vines and fancy woodland creatures coming to tea; the passive voice acquired pirates of dubious competence; the present perfect attracted goblins who had definitely done something they now regretted.
Eventually the literature classes caught the contagion as well. Shakespeare and Chaucer appeared in crisp lines beside the text, looking faintly weary but willing to be coloured in. Students took notes in the scrolls wrapped around their portraits. A few gave Chaucer eyeliner. Frankly, he wore it well.
At a university level, this worked remarkably well. Literature teaching often involves long stretches of lecturing or close textual commentary before we can open the floor for discussion. It’s necessary, but it’s also the kind of stillness where attention has every opportunity to wander. Colouring gave students something quiet and steady to do with their hands while they listened—neither disruptive nor distracting, just enough movement to keep the mind anchored through the denser parts of the lesson.
The colouring itself was never the point, and never compulsory. A basket of pencils lived on my desk so students could grab a handful if they wanted to. Most of it happened quietly while I spoke, or in the moments after a student finished their task. It became a graceful alternative to the dreaded “You’re done early? Here’s another exercise,” which rarely motivates anyone and often punishes the quick.
Multimodal
At first glance, colouring pages and grammar drills might seem like uneasy bedfellows. But when examined through the lens of established learning theory, the pairing does make sense, particularly within neurodiverse and multilingual classrooms. Colourable worksheets aren’t a novelty; they’re a form of multimodal learning. The small choices I had made while experimenting with the design—clear structure, visual themes, space to colour—aligned surprisingly well with established research in language learning and cognitive psychology.
One of the most widely discussed ideas in this area is dual coding theory, first proposed by Allan Paivio (1990). The basic premise is straightforward: people tend to remember information more effectively when it is presented through both verbal and visual channels. Words and images travel through slightly different cognitive pathways, and when those pathways converge, the concept itself becomes easier to retrieve.
In the language classroom, this matters more than it might first appear. Grammar explanations are often highly abstract, particularly for learners working in a second language. When an example sentence appears alongside an illustration, it gains a context that is easier to picture and therefore easier to remember. A sentence like “The badger might be sleeping” becomes less of an isolated grammatical structure and more of a tiny scene. The modal verb is still the focus, but the image helps anchor it.
Themed worksheets amplify this effect by creating a shared visual world across the page. When every example sentence belongs to the same miniature narrative—pirates negotiating with sea monsters, woodland animals making polite requests—the grammar becomes embedded in a recognisable context. Students often recall the theme long after the lesson itself: “Was that the pirate worksheet?” or “That was the fox one.” Once they remember the scene, the rule tends to follow.
In other words, the goal is not decoration. It is orientation.
Universal Design for Learning
Another framework that quietly resonates with this approach is Universal Design for Learning (UDL), which encourages educators to offer multiple ways for students to engage with material, understand it, and demonstrate what they have learned. Although the worksheets were not originally designed with UDL terminology in mind, they ended up aligning with many of its core ideas.
The illustrations provide an additional way of representing the material. Students encounter the grammar both as language and as part of a visual scene, allowing different learners to access the same concept from slightly different angles. For multilingual classrooms in particular, this can make abstract structures feel less opaque.
The optional colouring element adds a layer of flexibility. Some students colour the entire page. Others shade a single pirate hat while listening. Many ignore the pencils entirely. That range of responses is precisely the point. The worksheets do not demand a particular mode of engagement; they simply make several available.
In this sense, the illustrations function as an invitation. Students who find traditional worksheets stressful or visually dense often approach them with more curiosity when the page feels playful rather than purely procedural.
There is also a quieter emotional dimension at work here. Language learning carries a great deal of vulnerability. Students are often asked to experiment publicly with structures they have not yet mastered, which can raise anxiety and discourage participation. Stephen Krashen (1985) described this dynamic through the idea of the affective filter: when learners feel tense or self-conscious, the mind becomes less receptive to new input.
Small design choices can soften that barrier. A worksheet populated by bunnies in waistcoats does not look like an exam paper waiting to judge you. It looks like something you can explore. The expectations of the task remain the same, as the grammar is still there, but the atmosphere around it shifts slightly.
Sometimes that shift is all a learner needs in order to lean in rather than pull away.
Tactile Anchors
Another pattern became clear after a semester of using these worksheets. Some students simply concentrate better when their hands have something to do.
This is not unusual. Many learners regulate their attention through small, repetitive movements: tapping a pen, doodling in the margins, folding the corner of a page. In more traditional worksheets, these habits often become a distraction in themselves, gradually taking over the space meant for the lesson.
Colourable worksheets can change that dynamic somewhat. Because the illustrations are part of the page rather than an afterthought, the act remains connected to the material. Students can shade Beowulf’s shield while still following the discussion around him.
Research on attention and executive function (Andrade, 2010) suggests that low-level motor activity can sometimes support sustained focus for learners who struggle in purely passive environments. The key is that the activity remains simple and repetitive. Colouring, like knitting or idle sketching, occupies just enough attention to settle the restless part of the mind without pulling it away from the task at hand.
What surprised me most was how often this small adjustment changed the rhythm of a lesson. Students who might otherwise drift in and out of the discussion remained present. They listened, contributed, and occasionally glanced down to add another line of colour before looking back up again.
Structure and Theme
In practice, every worksheet begins with the same principle: structure first, theme second.
However playful the illustrations become, the underlying layout remains deliberately calm. Grammar explanations, example sentences, and exercises appear in the same visual arrangement across every unit. The font remains consistent, instructions are clearly separated from examples, and key rules are framed so they can be located at a glance.
Space also matters. Lines are spaced generously enough for comfortable writing, and small “note windows” may appear throughout the page where students can add their own explanations or mnemonic devices.
Only once this structural framework is in place does the theme enter the picture. At that stage, the illustrations act less like decoration and more like atmosphere. A worksheet on modal verbs might feature woodland animals negotiating politely over tea. Conditional sentences might unfold on the deck of a slightly doomed pirate ship weighing the odds of sea monsters and storms. The grammar remains unchanged, but the examples now belong to a small narrative environment in which the examples belong together.
That sense of cohesion matters more than the individual drawings themselves. When learners recall the lesson later, they often remember the theme first. “That was the pirate worksheet,” someone will say. From there, the rule tends to resurface with surprising clarity.
Not For Everyone
Introducing colourable worksheets to a university (or even high school) classroom always carries a small risk. At first glance, a grammar sheet populated by ferrets in bonnets or cartoon Anglo-Saxon warrior poets can look suspiciously like something meant for a much younger audience. It would not be unreasonable for a student to glance at the page and wonder whether their lecturer has finally lost the plot.
In my personal experience, that reaction has been surprisingly rare.
More often, the response is curiosity. Some students immediately reach for the pencils; others raise an eyebrow and carry on with the exercises. The key point is that the worksheet still functions perfectly well without a single stroke of colour. The structure remains clear, the grammar or literary exercises remain central, and the illustrations quietly sit in the margins for those who choose to engage with them.
Framing the practice early helps. I usually do explain that the visuals serve three purposes: they provide a thematic link between examples, offer a visual memory cue, and can give students something tactile to focus on while listening. Colouring itself is never required. Once students understand that the illustrations are a tool rather than a task, most are content to let them exist without needing to adopt them personally.
Of course, visuals alone cannot carry a lesson. A well-designed worksheet must still stand on its own terms. The grammar explanations must be clear, the exercises appropriate to the level, and the layout coherent. No amount of charming illustration can rescue weak pedagogical design. For that reason, I always begin with a simple test: if the worksheet were stripped of every image, would it still function as a useful learning tool? If the answer is no, it is not ready.
There is also the practical question of time. Themed worksheets take longer to produce than conventional ones. I won’t pretend otherwise. They require careful planning, consistent formatting, and a small library of illustrations that can be adapted across lessons. Yet the investment tends to repay itself over time. The worksheets remain reusable, and students often return to them long after the class has ended.
Perhaps most tellingly, they rarely end up in the bin.
Students who have spent time colouring a worksheet are more likely to keep it, revisit it, or pull it out again when studying. Some have told me that they initially opened the sheet at home simply to finish colouring it, only to find themselves rereading the examples in the process. (Accidental revision is still revision.) Others have remarked that the themes helped them remember the purpose of a particular grammar rule.
Conclusion
Over the years I have borrowed a number of ideas from tabletop role-playing games for use in the classroom. Mostly lessons in patience. Anyone who has ever tried to guide a group of players toward an obvious narrative goal will know that “herding cats” is a wildly optimistic metaphor.
But of all the things I have stolen from a Dungeons & Dragons table, the most useful was also the least dramatic. Sometimes the difference between distraction and attention is simply giving someone’s hands something to do.
Themed, colourable worksheets are not the sort of innovation that usually inspires conference keynotes. At first glance they look suspiciously like the academic equivalent of bringing biscuits to a serious meeting. They are quiet things. Slightly whimsical. (And who doesn’t enjoy biscuits?)
This article is not really an argument for colouring books as pedagogy. It is an argument for deliberate design. For classrooms that offer more than one way into understanding. For learning environments where students can approach difficult material without feeling that every moment is a test.
In that sense, the goal was never to make learning cute.
It was to make it kind.
References
Andrade, J. (2010). What does doodling do? Applied Cognitive Psychology, 24(1), 100–106. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1561
Krashen, S. D. (1985). The input hypothesis: Issues and implications. Longman.
Paivio, A. (1990). Mental representations: A dual coding approach. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195066661.001.0001
Nicky De Proost has taught English at university level in Japan, specialising in media literacy and reading comprehension. Convinced that Dungeons & Dragons has more classroom applications than it gets credit for.