Twelve Christmas drawings to make and keep
The Christmas drawing trail has a star, decorated tree, present, snowman, stocking, gingerbread friend, bell, bauble, candle, mitten, snow globe and winter cottage. Build each outline and its details through several trails. Keep partial progress, colour the finished picture, download a PNG and earn its full-drawing sticker.
Choose outline practice or the full drawing, counting in ones, twos or fives, and an optional next-dot guide. Christmas and Halloween saves are separate. The same twelve finished Christmas pictures also form the Christmas Memory deck: six, eight or twelve pairs, with freshly shuffled positions each round.
Eight Halloween drawings, with details to build
The Halloween drawing trail includes a pumpkin lantern, friendly ghost, bat, witch’s hat, bubbling cauldron, midnight lantern, cat and wrapped sweet. Each full picture has four to six trails: draw its outline, then add its face or other details. Full drawings contain 22–34 dots.
Choose any picture, switch to outline-only practice, count in ones, twos or fives, or turn off the next-dot highlight. Progress and colours stay on this browser. Finish a full picture to earn its sticker; download the completed drawing as a PNG. An outline alone does not earn the full-drawing sticker. There is no timer, score target or forced order.
The classic pictures below remain a separate shorter activity. Halloween drawing progress does not depend on the grown-up key-stage setting.
How to play Connect the Dots
A picture is hidden in a scatter of numbered dots. Tap dot 1, then dot 2, then dot 3, and a purple line is drawn behind you from each dot to the next. Reach the last number and the outline closes, fills with a soft purple wash, and the finished picture pops up over the board as a big emoji. That is the whole game: no timer, no lives, no score to chase.
The dot you need next is always obvious. It sits a little larger than the rest, wears a gold ring, and a soft yellow halo pulses around it once a second. A counter above the board reads "Dot 4/9" so a child always knows how far through the picture they are, and every dot that has not been reached yet still shows its number, so the whole sequence stays readable as a number line.
Controls
- Touchscreen: tap the dots. Each one has an invisible hit area roughly twice its visible size, so a thumb or a stylus that lands slightly off still registers.
- Mouse or trackpad: click the dots. The cursor turns to a pointer over the board until the picture is finished.
- Start over clears the line and puts you back at dot 1 on the same picture. Next puzzle moves on to the following picture in the set and loops back to the first when you reach the end.
Keyboard: press Tab to move between the numbered dots, then Enter or Space to join the focused dot. Joined dots leave the Tab order. Choose the numbers in sequence, just as you would by tapping; choosing another number keeps your progress and reminds you which dot comes next. Nothing needs to be dragged.
The fifteen pictures, and how they scale
Connect the Dots reads the working level set for the session and swaps the whole picture library to match, so the same page is a three-dot warm-up for one child and a twenty-dot drawing task for another:
- KS1 (Years R to 2, ages 5 to 7): triangle (3 dots), square (4), house (5), boat (7), sun (8) and pumpkin (8). Short enough that a child holds the whole count in their head.
- Lower KS2 (Years 3 and 4, ages 7 to 9): boat (7), house (9), fish (9), star (10), heart (10) and ghost (12). The star and heart outlines double back on themselves, so the numbers stop matching the order your eye wants to go in, and the ghost turns round at dot 8 to run back along a wavy hem.
- Upper KS2 (Years 5 and 6, ages 9 to 11): tree (15), rocket (16), dragon (17), bat (18) and castle (20). At this length the picture is really a 1 to 20 number-line drill wearing a disguise.
Stickers
Finishing a picture awards its sticker, and there is one for each of the fifteen: Triangle Tracer, Square Tracer, Sunshine Maker, Home Builder, Sea Captain, Pumpkin Carver, Star Tracer, Heart Drawer, Fish Finder, Friendly Ghost, Tree of Life, Rocket Builder, Dragon Tamer, Bat Spotter and Castle Architect. They join everything else earned across the site in the shared sticker book, and because they are keyed to the picture rather than the session, a child can collect the full set over several sittings.
Tips for tutors and parents
- Say the number out loud with the child before they tap it. The counter above the board gives you the number to say, which turns a silent tapping activity into a counting one.
- If a child is guessing rather than reading, cover the pulsing halo with a finger for a round. The numbers are still printed on every unreached dot, so the picture becomes a genuine number search.
- Use Start over on a picture the child enjoyed rather than moving on. Repeating the same sequence is where the counting fluency actually comes from.
- The KS1 triangle and square are only three and four dots. They make a good first success for a child who needs a win before a harder task.
Who Connect the Dots is for
This one was built for the children who find a normal counting worksheet hard to start. There is nothing to read, nothing to type, no time pressure and no way to fail: tapping the wrong dot flashes it red for a quarter of a second and then the board waits again, with progress untouched. That errorless feel is what makes it usable with children who disengage the moment an activity tells them they are wrong.
In practice it does three jobs at once - number recognition, one-to-one ordering and the fine-motor act of aiming at a small target - which is why it works as an opener in a tutoring session or as a calm task between two harder ones. It runs in any modern browser on a tablet, laptop or classroom whiteboard, so it behaves the same way over a screen share as it does with the child in the room.
Printable dot-to-dot pictures
Want to join the dots on paper? The Halloween dot-to-dot pack has a 20-dot pumpkin, a 30-dot ghost and a 20-dot bat wing. The Christmas dot-to-dot pack has a 10-dot star and a 30-dot tree. Both free PDFs include finished-picture guides. These are separate printable drawings; their dot counts differ from the online pictures above.
Questions parents and tutors ask
Is Connect the Dots free to play?
Yes. It is free to play in your browser, with no signup, no download and no in-game purchases. Built by a UK SEND tutor with QTS.
How many pictures are there?
Fifteen distinct classic pictures, split across the three working levels described above, plus eight Halloween and twelve Christmas multi-trail drawings. Each level shows its own set of five or six, and the Next puzzle button cycles round that set rather than jumping between levels.
Are there any Halloween pictures?
Eight in the Halloween drawing collection, with multiple trails, saved progress and a PNG download. The classic sets also include pumpkin, ghost and bat outlines. They are drawn in the same plain purple outline as every other picture, so there is nothing in them to unsettle a child who finds Halloween a lot.
What happens if a child taps the wrong dot?
The dot flashes red for a moment and nothing else happens. No progress is lost, no lives are taken and no sound scolds the child, so they can simply look again for the next number.
Does it work on a tablet or an interactive whiteboard?
Yes. Every dot has an invisible touch target larger than the dot itself, so it is forgiving of an imprecise tap, and the picture is drawn as scalable vector graphics, so it stays sharp blown up to whiteboard size.