Printable four quadrant graph paper

This is the paper for reflecting and translating shapes as much as for plotting points. A triangle drawn in the first quadrant and reflected in the y axis is a thing a child can check by counting squares, and counting squares is exactly what the grid is there to make possible.

It is also where a straight-line graph starts to be worth drawing. Plot y = 2x − 3 on this and the line leaves the first quadrant at the bottom, which is the fact that makes the negative half of the paper feel necessary rather than decorative.

Every line on the page above is drawn as ink rather than as a background, which is why it comes out of the printer looking like it does on screen: browsers throw background color away unless somebody has ticked Background graphics, and a chart printed as a set of empty boxes is worse than no chart. The lengths are in inches for the same sort of reason — a square that says it is three quarters of an inch is three quarters of an inch, because a child measuring against it will find out if it isn’t. The number in the footer is the seed the sheet was built from, so the identical sheet can be had again next week.

This page is one sheet out of a family that prints four: a hundred chart, a number line, a coordinate grid and a place-value chart. The range, the interval, how far the axes run and which places the columns hold are all settings — so a number line every 2 to 30, or a chart from 101 to 200, is the same sheet with one control moved rather than a page somebody has to have written first.

The settings travel in the link rather than on a server, so a sheet you make can be bookmarked or sent to another family as it stands — and the Name: line, where a sheet has one, is printed blank, because there is nowhere in a shared link to put a child’s name. See what we don’t collect.

A multiplication grid — blank to fill in, with the completed twelve-by-twelve square on the page behind it — is on the math shelf, because it is the times-table family with the grid switched on rather than a chart of its own. Squared, dotted and isometric paper is on the paper shelf, where everything comes on both Letter and A4: a quarter-inch square scaled to fit whatever was in the tray is no longer a quarter-inch square.