Letter of the Week: Trace, Circle and Write One Letter

One letter fills this Kindergarten letter-of-the-week worksheet from top to bottom, and the page shown here is the Mm sheet. A cream card at the top left prints the capital and small letter on handwriting lines; beside it run two tracing lanes, one for M and one for m, each starting with a solid model letter and continuing in dashed letters with red stroke dots and arrows on the first. Below the lanes sit eight picture cards in two rows of four — on this sheet a mountain, a nut, a wallet, a monkey, a mouse, a net, a mop and a nurse — and the child circles the four whose name begins with the letter. Two full-width handwriting rows at the bottom, one headed M and one headed m, are for writing a row of each letter alone.

The sheet does the three jobs a letter introduction needs in the order a classroom does them: the shape first, then the sound, then the letter written without a guide. The four foil pictures are chosen so that none begins with the target — several on the M sheet begin with n, which looks and sounds close — so the child has to say each word and listen to its first sound rather than recognize a shape. Nothing on the page is labeled; the picture names stay in the child's mouth.

It prints on one sheet in portrait and needs only a pencil. The words-with page in this family moves the letter away from the start of the word, the beginning-middle-end page asks where the sound sits, and the M-or-N page puts two look-alike letters side by side.