Days and Months Tracing

Two lists worth getting right

Monday through Sunday, January through December, printed as trace-and-copy rows on the standard four-line ruling.

They are here as a handwriting sheet and they do two jobs, because these are also words a child will write on nearly every piece of dated work for the next decade.

Capitals, always

The rule this sheet quietly teaches, and one children get wrong for years.

Days and months are proper nouns in English and take a capital. The seasons do not: spring stays lowercase, and so does every one of the other three. That inconsistency is arbitrary enough that no child works it out unaided.

It also differs by language. A child from a Spanish-speaking family has seen lunes written lowercase, correctly, all their life. So has a French speaker with janvier. The English rule will look arbitrary to them, because it is.

The spellings that actually cause trouble

Wednesday, which nobody pronounces the way it is spelled. Saying it as "Wed-nes-day" while writing it is the standard trick and it works.

February, for the same reason — the first r goes missing in speech and therefore in writing.

Tuesday and Thursday, which get confused with each other, and both of which are commonly misspelled.

August, which is short and looks wrong to children who expect a longer month.

Where the names come from

Worth ten minutes with an older class, because it makes the spellings memorable rather than arbitrary.

Wednesday is Woden's day, which explains the buried d. Thursday is Thor's. Saturday belongs to Saturn, and is the only English weekday named for a Roman god rather than a Norse one. Then there is the odd business of September through December, whose names mean seventh to tenth while they sit ninth to twelfth in the year — because the Roman calendar used to start in March.

That last one reliably produces an argument, which is the point.

What you can change

The text is editable, so a sheet can carry just the days, just the months, or only the four that keep coming back wrong. Plus font, trace style, rows per line, ruling colour and line height. A4 or US Letter at 100%.

Twelve months is a long sheet. Six at a time, twice, produces better handwriting than all twelve in one sitting.