Word shapes worksheets

Word shapes are the reading scheme's answer to a child who knows all their sounds and still cannot spell, and they work because a word has a silhouette. “Bed” and “bad” are the same three sounds and a different picture; “light” has two tall letters at the front and a tail nowhere. A child who has drawn the shape a few times has a second way of checking a word that has nothing to do with sounding it out.

The boxes are drawn as hairlines rather than as shaded blocks, which matters more here than it looks: browsers throw away background paint when printing unless somebody has found the “Background graphics” checkbox, and a word-shape sheet whose boxes were a tint comes out of the printer as an empty page. Everything on this sheet is a stroke, so it prints as it looks. The answer key writes each letter into its own box.

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 words on it are one of the shipped sight-word lists, and the box that holds them takes a typed or pasted list instead — this week’s spellings off a school letter, or a list you already keep in the game. The same words then print as any of the seven styles: written out, in word shapes, with letters missing, in ABC order, in a sentence, found among near misses, or as a blank test.

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.