Letter Studio

About this tool

Letter Studio puts one enormous letter on the board, sitting on the same lined writing guide your class already uses on paper. Pick any letter or number straight from the row along the top — the whole alphabet in your language, its own accented letters, and the digits 0 to 9. Press play and a firefly walks the stroke order with a soft chime at the start of each stroke, so the whole room sees where the pencil begins and which way it travels. Numbered strokes and small arrows stay on the letter while the child works, which is the part nobody can work out from a finished letter on a wall chart.

Then the child traces it with a finger, and the line appears only where their finger has actually been. It never runs ahead of them and it never finishes the letter for them: stop halfway and the letter is halfway. Wander off the path and the ink simply waits — the path is still there, the arrows travel again, and after a few tries the guide quietly widens. There is no red X anywhere in this tool, and no score, no timer and no stars. A letter is either still being learned or it has been written, and both are fine.

The lined guide is the part most handwriting tools get wrong outside English. A German class writes in a four-line Lineatur with a tinted middle band; a Spanish class writes between the two solid lines of doble raya; a French class writes on Seyès; a Brazilian class has no x-height line at all. Letter Studio draws the guide your country actually uses, ruled by teachers from that country rather than translated from an American worksheet. Every letter in your language’s own alphabet, every number, and any word you type in yourself are free, in all eleven languages.

How to use it in class

• Put it on the projector and press the play button on the sheet first — let the class watch the firefly trace the whole letter before anyone touches the board.
• Tap any letter or number along the top to go straight to it. Today's sound, the letter a child keeps reversing, the number they are working on — it is one tap, not a hunt.
• Invite one child up to trace it with a finger, starting at the green dot. The line joins in as they go and waits for them if they stray.
• Use the a / A pair to switch the same letter between small and capital, and the pencil button to type any word you like — the class writes it letter by letter with the whole word shown above.
• With a subscription, the pencil button also lists your class from Name Sticks, and the printer button gives you an A4 practice sheet for the letter on screen: a model with its stroke order, an unlabelled name box, then six rows on your own country’s ruling — two of eight letters to trace, two more in grey, one that gives a single example and leaves the rest of the line to you, and a last row that is ruled and empty.

Classroom ideas

• Introduce one new letter a day on the board: firefly first, then three children up to trace it, then straight onto paper while the shape is fresh.
• Put it on a tablet at the writing centre set to today's letter, so the children who need the stroke order again can ask the firefly instead of asking you.
• When a child reverses a letter, do not correct it on the paper: tap that letter here and watch the firefly together. Seeing where the stroke starts fixes far more reversals than a rubbed-out line does.
• Type the word the class is working on this week and let them write it together on the board — then print the same letter as a take-home sheet on the ruling they already use.
• In Names mode, let each child trace their own name on the board on their birthday — it is the most motivating handwriting minute of the whole year.