How to do word work with this week's spelling list
Here is how to do word work when Friday's list is longer than Monday morning. Four words. Two jobs. Then the pencil goes back in the cup.
Open the word work page and paste four words, one on each line: cat, dog, sun, ball.
Leave the font on Patrick Hand. For a 5- or 6-year-old, leave the traceable first copy on, and leave the stroke guides on. Those guides are a start dot and an arrow on Latin letters. Download the PDF. The English page is already on US Letter. There is a name line and a date line at the top, and no watermark.
Four words, two jobs
The first page is titled "Write each word three times." The word sits at the left. Three lines sit under it. With tracing on, the first line carries a pale copy of the word. The other two lines are empty.
The second page is titled "Fill in the missing letter." The same words come back, and one letter has become a short line. Print the page twice and the blank stays in the same place. The generator picks that letter from the word itself.
| Word | On the fill-in page |
|---|---|
| cat | c_t |
| dog | d_g |
| sun | s_n |
| ball | ba_l |
A word of three letters or more keeps its first letter and its last letter. The blank is one of the letters in the middle. A word of one or two letters blanks the first letter, so "to" prints as a line followed by o, and "a" prints as a line with nothing after it. Those short sight words are a weak fill-in. Keep them on the write-three page, or leave them off this sheet.
What actually fits on the paper
The generator starts a new write-three page every eight words. On US Letter, the three lines under the fifth word fall off the bottom of the page. Four words stay on the paper, including the last line under "ball." If the class list has eight words, that is two mornings.
The Dolch sight words button pastes the pre-primer list, all 40 words. That is five write-three pages, and the bottom of each page is cut off on Letter. Fry 1–25 pastes 25 words. Use the button to fetch the list, then delete down to the four words for this morning. The same four words print the same pages every time. Nothing you type is uploaded.
| Age | On this sheet |
|---|---|
| 3–4 | Too early. Stay on lines and curves. |
| 5–6 | Four words. Tracing on. Stroke guides on. |
| 7+ | Turn the traceable first copy off. The word label stays, and all three lines are blank. |
A child who still needs the dotted midline belongs on three-line paper. Put those words through name tracing instead. Sight words that need a dotted row have their own write-up, sight word tracing worksheets. A sentence, rather than a list, is copywork.
If Monday stalls
Cut the list to two words. Turn the stroke guides off if the arrow is what the argument is about. The pale first line is enough. Stop when the third line under the second word is filled. Printing the whole pre-primer is how the hour disappears.