Contraction worksheets

The apostrophe is the whole lesson, and it has one job: it marks where letters were taken out. A child who knows that never has to remember whether it is “dont”, “do’nt” or “don’t” — the o is the letter that went, so the mark goes where the o was. That one idea covers nearly every contraction in English and is worth ten minutes more than it usually gets.

“Won’t” is the one that breaks it, and it is on this sheet on purpose. It comes from “woll not” rather than “will not”, which no child needs to be told — but it is worth knowing that the mark is not always where the letters came out, so that one odd spelling is met as an exception rather than as evidence that the rule was never real. Matching rather than writing keeps the focus on the pairing; the builder prints the same twelve as a write-it-out sheet.

The answers were decided when the sheet was built, so the key is the same page with them drawn in rather than a second attempt at the same questions — there is no way for the two to disagree. The number in the footer is the seed the sheet was built from: it is printed so that the identical sheet can be had again next week, rather than one that merely looks like it.

This page is one sheet out of a family that can print thousands. The topic is a setting rather than a different worksheet: ten of them — rhyme, syllables, word families, prefixes and suffixes, plurals, contractions, homophones, synonyms and antonyms — and each is asked in whichever of the three shapes suits it, written on a ruled line, circled from four, or joined up in two columns. How many questions and how many columns are switches beside them.

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 is printed blank, because there is nowhere in a shared link to put a child’s name. See what we don’t collect.

Word Jungle deals the sight-word lists as flash cards: the word is read aloud, in a sentence, and typed back — which is the half of spelling a worksheet cannot do, because paper cannot say a word out loud. A child who has just worked through a page is the one likeliest to race it, and the record book then knows which words they keep missing, so the next sheet can be exactly those.