Dotted Lines

Jean Kalscheur, fresh out of pre-service training, has become This Week’s Favorite Tutor! Jean informed me of a free resource for learners and tutors working on handwriting. The two websites below give you a way to create your own writing paper templates. The writing paper resembles the stuff we used in grade school, with the dotted line between big lines.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/CT101448201033.aspx?stt=1 This link has templates for specialty papers for MS Office. It includes templates for MS Office 97 to MS Office 2007 users. The first few pages are for Office 2007. Keep going to find templates for earlier versions of MS Office. The penmanship/writing papers are mixed in with the other specialty papers, but there are lots of variations in lines/dotted lines so one can select the writing paper that works best for a learner.

http://incompetech.com/graphpaper/ Scroll down about ¾ of the page to Writing / Penmanship / Note-Taking papers. These download to pdf, so PC or Mac or person without MS Office can download these templates. These templates have a nice feature in that you can select a color to make the lines, which might provide better contrast for some learners.

If using lots of paper, it would be less expensive to buy “penmanship” paper at a school or office supply store. But the templates are helpful to determine what paper works for a learner (bigger space between lines, dotted lines, color contrast, alphabet reminder at top of pages, etc.) and for when you need paper now and didn’t have time to stop and get it at the store.

Now I had a little trouble with the Microsoft page, but I eventually solved it. Please note: it seems to work better with Internet Explorer than any other browser. Wonder why that is? Hmm.

There’s nothing quite like having a volunteer tutor. Thanks, as always, for helping someone.