Alphabet Reference Poster

The whole alphabet on one page

Capitals A to Z, then lowercase a to z. Rows of seven, a box round every letter, and directional arrows showing the stroke order.

The rows sit at a 7 mm line height, which keeps the whole alphabet on a single sheet at a size still readable from a few feet away.

The arrows are the point

An alphabet chart without them shows a child what a letter looks like. That is the easy half.

The hard half is how it is made, and a letter that looks right can be built entirely wrong — an a drawn as a circle with a line stuck on afterwards, an e started at the bottom, a capital E built from four separate strokes. Those work at five and fail at nine, when writing has to get faster and a bad stroke order cannot be sped up.

The arrows put the correct sequence in front of the child every time they look up a letter, which is the moment they are most likely to absorb it.

Two rules the arrows encode

Top to bottom. Left to right. Almost every letter obeys both.

Where a letter has more than one stroke, the arrows also settle the order — the down stroke before the cross bar on a t, the tall line before the bowl on a b. That order is what makes the letter joinable later, and it is invisible in a finished letter.

Where to put it

Somewhere it can be consulted without anybody having to ask. Taped to a desk, inside a folder, on the wall beside the writing table.

The value is in it being looked up rather than taught. A child who checks a letter themselves has done something more useful than a child who was told, and the checking is what makes a reference sheet different from a lesson.

Both cases, and why

Capitals and lowercase are on the same sheet deliberately, because the relationship between the pairs is itself something to learn.

Some pairs are the same shape at two sizes — C and c, O and o, S and s. Others are unrelated shapes that happen to share a name, which is a genuinely strange fact about our alphabet: A and a, G and g, R and r have very little in common. Children benefit from having those two facts side by side rather than in two lessons.

Print it larger if you can

On A3, if you have access to one, for a wall in a classroom. On A4 it works at a desk. Print at 100% either way, since a scaled sheet changes the letter heights and this is a reference for proportion as much as for shape.

Related: the handwriting practice generator for practising the letters this sheet only displays.