Write the Word with Only the First Letter to Start You Off

One teal letter waits at the start of each line, and it is the only help on this 1st grade write-the-word page. Six animals are set out two across and three down, a leopard, an antelope, a rabbit, an orangutan, a fish and a vulture, and beside each picture runs a clean handwriting rule with its opening letter already in place: l, a, r, o, f, v. There is no word bank at the top of the sheet and no row of boxes underneath to count the letters into. Everything after that first letter has to come from the child.

The starting letter does one job and one job only: it settles which word is meant. A picture of a rabbit could be read as bunny, and a picture of a fish could be read half a dozen ways, so an r or an f removes the guesswork without giving away a single sound of the spelling that follows. After that the child is encoding, listening through the word and choosing letters for the sounds they hear, and the plain line neither counts the letters nor corrects them. What comes back is the most honest spelling sample of any page in this family, and the vowels in the middle of the longer words are where the story usually is.

Print the PDF free and ask for each animal to be said slowly, stretched out, before the pencil moves; the sounds have to be heard before they can be written. Six cards is enough to show a pattern without becoming a test. Write the word with a word bank puts the spelling back on the page for a child who is not ready to encode alone, letter boxes and the first letter adds a box for every sound, and write the word on plain lines takes even the opening letter away.