Proverb Copying

Handwriting practice with something in it

Short well-known sayings printed on four-line ruling with rows to copy onto: a stitch in time saves nine, actions speak louder than words, better late than never.

The handwriting exercise is identical to any other sentence sheet. What changes is what is in the child's head while they write.

Proverbs are figurative language in its smallest form

Almost none of them mean what they say.

Nobody is stitching anything. No birds are involved. A child who reads "a stitch in time saves nine" literally has understood every word and none of the sentence, and that gap — between literal comprehension and actual meaning — is one of the harder things in reading to teach directly.

Proverbs make it teachable, because each one is short enough to unpick in a minute and the literal reading is obviously absurd, which is the joke and the lesson at the same time.

Ask what it means, every time

The sheet is worth about four times as much with thirty seconds of conversation attached to each saying.

Ask for the literal meaning first — what does it actually say? — then for the real one, then for a situation it would fit. That third question is the one that shows whether it landed, and it is where you find out that a child thinks "birds of a feather flock together" is about birds.

Particularly useful for one group

Children learning English as an additional language, for whom idiom is the last thing to arrive and the thing that most often leaves them lost in an otherwise comprehensible conversation.

Idioms cannot be worked out from the words, they are rarely taught explicitly, and native speakers use them without noticing. A sheet that puts five of them in front of somebody, with an adult to explain them, is doing something a vocabulary list cannot.

What you can change

Replace the proverbs with any you like — the practice text is just text. The font, whether letters join, trace style, rows per sentence, ruling colour and line height are all adjustable. A4 or US Letter.

For a class from mixed backgrounds, proverbs from several languages translated into English make a better sheet than the standard English set, and a considerably better discussion.

Print at 100%.