Printable book report form

The two words that do the work on this sheet are "and why". A favorite part with no reason attached is one sentence and the end of the exercise; the same question with a reason asked for is a paragraph, and it is the first paragraph most children write that argues something rather than retelling it. The box is sized for that answer rather than for the question.

The boxes are deliberately not the same height as each other. The title gets a line, because a title is a line; what the book is about gets the largest share of the page, because that is the part worth thinking about. A form ruled into equal boxes teaches a child that every question on it is worth the same amount of writing, which is precisely the thing a book report is trying to unteach.

Every rule, every box and every cut line on the page above is drawn as ink rather than as a background color, which is why it comes out of the printer looking like it does on screen: browsers throw background paint away unless somebody has ticked Background graphics, and a page of cut guides that printed invisibly is a page somebody cuts freehand. The lengths are in inches for a plainer reason still — a card that says it is three and three quarter inches wide is going to be measured, and a die that is not square does not fold up. The number in the footer is the seed the sheet was built from, so the identical sheet can be had again next term.

This page is one sheet out of four families that between them print the forms, the week, the paper that gets cut up and the two things that are objects rather than pages. How many rows a chart has, how many cards there are to a page, how much room each answer gets, which verse is on it and whether a tag folds are all settings — so a chore chart with six rows, or a dated calendar for next March, 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.