Fill in the Blank: Letter Boxes

Seven sentences run down this 1st grade page, each opening with a picture and the word The, then a row of dashed letter boxes, then the rest of the sentence. There is no word bank. The sheet shown asks for penguin, zebra, turtle, rooster, rabbit, owl and bee, so the rows offer seven, five, six, seven, six, three and three boxes. The child reads the sentence, looks at the picture and writes the animal one letter to a box.

Taking the bank away turns the base page into a spelling page, and the boxes are the replacement scaffold: they fix the length before the first letter is written, which stops a child inventing pengwin and running out of room. Two pairs of rows share a box count, so the number alone never settles the answer and the picture still has to be read. Rooster and penguin are the long ones and usually the ones that need a second look.

One sheet, seven words, thirty-seven letters. Sentences that run past the boxes wrap underneath the picture, so read each one through before writing. This is the spelling face of the cloze family and the right step after the word-bank page, when a child can find the word but is not yet producing it unaided.