Dark Phonics · The Writing Shelf · v2
Eleven printables for the eight-tray Writing Shelf. Thirteen sheets became ten, twenty-four sheets of paper became sixteen, and every word an adult needs to read now sits on the part of the paper you throw away. Sheet K was added afterwards, and is the one sheet you may never need to print: a photographed stand-in for every miniature, for the objects you could not buy.
Print at 100%. In the print dialog choose Actual size or Scale: 100%, never Fit to page. Every size on these sheets is a real measured size, and “fit to page” quietly shrinks it by about 4% — enough that a 70 mm sound frame stops holding one counter cleanly.
Where a sheet says duplex, flip on the SHORT edge. Only two jobs can now go wrong — the chain cards and the dictation cards — and they are the same job twice, so set the printer once and run both together. Those two sheets are portrait, which means the backs are printed upside down on the sheet on purpose: that is what short-edge duplex needs, and it comes out the right way up on the cut card. Print one sheet, hold a card to the light, and check the word is behind its own photograph before you commit the rest.
Laminate before you cut, everywhere. v1 said this only on the grammar tokens. It is true of the heart cards, the punctuation tiles and the sequence cards too, and it is the difference between a material that lasts a year and one that peels at the corners in a fortnight. Everything laminated is on 250 or 300 gsm; everything the child writes on is plain paper. That is the whole stock decision.
| # | Printable | Tray | File | Pages | Paper | Finish |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | Sound-frame mat — 3-frame / 4-frame | 1 and 3 | 01-sound-frame-mat.pdf | 2 | A4 landscape, 300 gsm card | duplex · short edge matt laminate |
| A3 | Sound-frame mat — A3 version of A (print one or the other) | 1 and 3 | 01b-sound-frame-mat-A3.pdf | 2 | A3 landscape, 300 gsm card | duplex · short edge matt laminate |
| B | Chain cards ×6 | 3 | 02-chain-cards.pdf | 4 | A4 portrait, 250 gsm card | duplex · short edge laminate |
| C | Dictation photo cards ×12 | 4 (and 1, 2) | 03-dictation-photo-cards.pdf | 6 | A4 portrait, 250 gsm card | duplex · short edge laminate |
| D | Small objects — 5 heart words, 7 blanks, 3 punctuation tiles | 4 and 5 | 04-small-objects.pdf | 1 | A4 portrait, 300 gsm card | laminate |
| E | Lined sentence strips, 190 × 60 mm | 5 | 05-lined-sentence-strips.pdf | 1 | A4 portrait, plain 100–120 gsm paper | — |
| F | Picture sequences ×3 (12 cards) | 6 | 06-picture-sequences.pdf | 3 | A4 portrait, 250 gsm card | laminate |
| G | Fold-book template | 6 | 07-fold-book-template.pdf | 1 | A4 landscape, plain 100–120 gsm paper | — |
| H | Story-dictation sheet | 7 | 08-story-dictation-sheet.pdf | 1 | A4 portrait, plain 100 gsm paper | — |
| I | Teacher script card, 2-up A5 | 7 | 09-teacher-script-card.pdf | 1 | A4 landscape, 250 gsm card | laminate |
| J | Grammar pack — 12 tokens + 4 control cards | 8 | 10-grammar-pack.pdf | 2 | A4 portrait, 300 gsm card, colour | laminate |
| K | Backup object cards ×26 — 50 × 50 mm | 1, 2 and 8 | 11-backup-object-cards.pdf | 2 | A4 landscape, 300 gsm card | matt laminate |
| L | Word-card tin — 50 words, 60 × 35 mm | 5 | 12-word-card-tin.pdf | 3 | A4 portrait, 300 gsm card | laminate |
Want different words or pictures? Use the Writing Shelf generator at /montree/library/tools/writing-shelf-generator — it makes the same works your way and keeps these sheets exactly as they are.
01-sound-frame-mat.pdf
Sheets 01 and 02 of v1 were the same object at two different sizes. They are now one mat: three frames of 70 mm on the front for Tray 1, four of 66 mm on the back for Tray 3, and the fourth frame outlined in amber because it is the spare — the one the child uses when a word gains or loses a sound. Print one sheet double-sided with the flip on SHORT EDGE, at 100% on the heaviest card your printer takes, cut along every grey line, edge to edge between the black triangles, to trim the mat out at 282 × 100 mm, and give it a MATT laminate; gloss throws the ceiling lights straight back at a child bent over it. A wrong flip costs nothing here — it is one mat face on each side of one piece of card, with no picture to land behind a word. Nothing is printed on the mat itself: every word on the sheet is on the paper you throw away. If you want the tiles genuinely recessed, glue the laminated mat onto 3 mm foam board and cut the windows out with a scalpel. And before Tray 3 runs, restock its letter tin: doubles of a b c d e g h i m n o p r t u — fifteen letters, thirty tiles, which is exactly what the six chains need and no more.
Cut along every grey line — two strokes down the sheet and two across, edge to edge — to trim the mat out at 282 × 100 mm — the same rectangle on both sides, so one cut does both faces. Front: three frames of 70 mm with 6 mm gutters. Back: four of 66 mm with 4 mm gutters.
01b-sound-frame-mat-A3.pdf
The same work as A, bigger. On A3 the mat is not three different margins but one uniform 15 mm border everywhere — outside the frames and between them — and the frames are sized to fill the cut rectangle exactly: three of 113.33 × 81 mm on the front, four of 81.25 × 81 mm on the back, the last one amber as always. Needs an A3 printer or a print shop. Print this sheet or sheet 01, not both: it is the same mat, and a tray wants one of them. Everything else is unchanged — duplex on SHORT EDGE at 100%, matt laminate, nothing printed on the mat itself.
Cut along every grey line — two strokes down the sheet and two across, edge to edge — to trim the mat out at 400 × 111 mm — the same rectangle on both sides, so one cut does both faces. Measured off the built file: frames 15.00 mm from the cut line and 15.00 mm apart, nearest black ink 5.50 mm from the paper edge.
02-chain-cards.pdf
Two sheets instead of six, and the card no longer does the child's naming for him. The front is the photograph and nothing else — no word, no chain number, no tray line — so he has to hear the word before he can build it. The back carries the word, then the five-word chain beneath it with the letter that moved printed in amber. All six chains were rewritten so that every word is one a five-year-old owns, every step moves exactly one letter, and every letter is in the tin: tap cap can pan pen · mop hop hot hut hug · peg beg bed bad bag · bin big bug dug mug · nut cut cup cap cat · rat bat bag big dig. Every start word is also a new photograph, so no chain card and no dictation card come out of the printer with the same front. The cards are 80 × 120 mm and butted, so the sheet keeps a 25 mm side margin and a 28.5 mm head and foot: cut along every grey line, edge to edge, and mount each card on a coloured backing card with a 1 cm border to finish at 100 × 140 mm. Those marks are printed on both faces at the same physical place, so you can check your registration before you cut — hold a sheet to the light and the front cross should sit exactly on the back cross. Print DUPLEX with the flip on SHORT EDGE — the backs are imposed for it and are printed upside down on the sheet on purpose. Print one sheet before you commit the rest and hold a card to the light: the chain must be behind its own photograph. Laminate; this is the tray they handle most. All six start-word photographs are now in: card 1's picture well carries the tap photograph like every other card, and no card front names its word.
Cut along every grey line — two straight strokes across the sheet and two down it, edge to edge — for four cards of 80 × 120 mm. Mounted on a coloured backing card with a 1 cm border all round they finish at 100 × 140 mm, which is what the card stands take. The black triangles in the margin mark where each line runs; they are in the same place on both faces, so the front cuts and the back cuts coincide.
03-dictation-photo-cards.pdf
Three sheets instead of twelve. Photograph alone on the front, the word alone on the back at 48 pt in the letterforms the children trace, and not one line of instruction on either face — a card whose whole purpose is that the child works without an adult should not be talking to him. cup, sun and net are gone: cup cannot be told from mug in a photograph, sun cannot be a single object on white, and net is a fishing net, a football net or a hairnet depending on who is looking. rug, cot and jam take their places. Same imposition as the chain cards, so set the printer once and run both jobs together: DUPLEX, SHORT EDGE, 100%, cut along every grey line. This pack is also Tray 1's week-four picture set and Tray 2's object substitute — one set of twelve photographs furnishing four trays.
Cut along every grey line — two straight strokes across the sheet and two down it, edge to edge — for four cards of 80 × 120 mm. Mounted on a coloured backing card with a 1 cm border all round they finish at 100 × 140 mm, which is what the card stands take. The black triangles in the margin mark where each line runs; they are in the same place on both faces, so the front cuts and the back cuts coincide.
04-small-objects.pdf
v1 spent one A4 on five stamp-sized heart cards and another on three tiny tiles. This is both, on one sheet, in one print and one laminate. Five heart words are printed — a, an, I, the, ate — and seven more cards carry the heart and a ruled space, because the guide says add one heart word a week and by half-term the teacher has none left. The heart is not decoration: it means this word has a trick in it and cannot be sounded out, which is why no heart card ever carries a picture. The three punctuation tiles stay deliberately oversized, because they are objects a child places on purpose. Every footer is gone from every piece; the STOP / QUESTION / SHOUT labels stay on the waste outside the outermost grey cut lines. Laminate the whole sheet first and cut afterwards — everyone does this the wrong way round once. Punch the dashed amber circle and ring the heart cards. Note the full stop is a 10 mm dot against the 30 mm red grammar circle of Tray 8: same shape, same hand, same term, and the size is what keeps them apart.
Cut along every grey line: 15 pieces — 12 cards at 60 × 35 mm and 3 tiles at 60 × 42 mm, not mounted — the tiles are the same WIDTH as the cards so the sheet is one three-column grid and every line, across and down, runs edge to edge. Punch the rings.
05-lined-sentence-strips.pdf
The strips are 190 mm now, not 200. At 200 mm on a 210 mm sheet the cut marks sat inside the unprintable margin of most office printers and the old guide had to tell the teacher to trim by eye; at 190 mm the problem simply does not arise, and the grammar control cards were moved to the same 190 mm so a control card and the child's own strip are the same object. “where is your dot?” is gone, and so is the tray footer: a printed nag on a consumable a child uses fifty times is a nag that never goes away, and the punctuation tile in his hand is the reminder. Three guides and no other ink anywhere on the strip — light top line, dashed amber midline at the x-height, solid baseline. Plain paper, print a term's worth, do not laminate.
Cut 4 strips, 190 × 60 mm — they butt, so every cut runs the full width or the full height of the sheet. Cut along every grey line.
06-picture-sequences.pdf
Three sheets where v1 had eight, and no backs at all — four sheets of card and the whole short-edge-flip risk were being spent on printing one letter sixteen times, when the print guide already told you to put each set in its own envelope. Put the letter on the envelope. Set D, sad to playing, is cut: it needs a child's face, which the house style forbids, and it is a different skill anyway — reading an emotion, not ordering an event. In its place, apple to core. ALL THREE SETS ARE NOW PHOTOGRAPHIC and each is normalised on its own terms: set A's pot is the same width and stands on the same line in all four frames, so only the plant changes; set B's frame, light, and distance hold steady so only the bird's stage of growth changes; set C holds the apple at the same distance and angle so only how much has been eaten changes. Style is uniform inside each set, which is what the child compares across, and now uniform across all three sets too. Nothing is printed on the picture face.
Cut 12 cards, 70 × 70 mm, four per sheet, along every grey line. Mounted on a coloured backing card with a 1 cm border they finish at 90 × 90 mm and still drop into the 10 × 10 cm envelopes. One sheet is still one complete set.
07-fold-book-template.pdf
The fold and cut geometry is unchanged and still correct, but the book has stopped writing itself for him. “the end” is gone from page 8 — that is his book's last page and if his story finishes on page 5 the book should not contradict him. “spell it the way it sounds” is gone; say it aloud once, it belongs on the teacher script. “draw it here” is gone six times over: a box is already an invitation, and six printed instructions is six things a child who is trying not to read is being asked to read. MY BOOK and the name line stay, because those are his. The p1–p8 fold markers are still there for you but at 5 pt grey at the extreme edge, near-invisible once folded. Print at 100%, fold in half three times, open flat, fold in half the long way and cut ONLY the amber line, then push the ends together until the slit opens into a diamond. Make six in advance.
One cut, along the amber line in the middle of the sheet. Three folds.
08-story-dictation-sheet.pdf
Almost untouched, because there was nothing structural to fix. The wide lines are spaced for an adult pen moving fast, and the small amber “acted on” tick is the quiet best idea on the shelf — it is the thing that stops a child being skipped for a month. Two changes only: the pronouns are neutral, because half the class is not a he, and the “HIS DRAWING” caption is gone. The box needs no caption. Print twenty, keep them in one folder with the class list, and read down the acted-on column every Friday.
None.
09-teacher-script-card.pdf
The only adult-facing card in the set, and the one thing that makes the author's chair run the same way when a different adult takes it. Six numbered lines, and it must not grow to eight. The guide tells you to tape it to the back of the author's chair and to keep it in the story folder, and you need both — so it is laid out 2-up and one print gives two identical cards. Pronouns neutral, same as the dictation sheet; otherwise untouched.
One cut down the middle, edge to edge, between the two black triangles: two identical A5 cards, 148.5 × 210 mm.
10-grammar-pack.pdf
v1's token sheet was the best-laid-out sheet in the set and the rest of v2 copies it: every word in the margin, the objects coming out as pure shapes. Its only failure was count — eighteen hand-cut shapes, twelve of them triangles with points that tear, and no sentence a five-year-old builds needs six nouns. Twelve now: four black triangles, four red circles, four dark-blue triangles, which covers any four-word sentence twice over. The colours are the Montessori ones and are not negotiable. Page 2 is rebuilt from the ground up, because v1's six printed sentences contradicted the shelf guide, which says in bold that the child symbolises six sentence strips he wrote himself and never a printed sentence from a book. There is now one symbol key card — black triangle / red circle / blue triangle, with naming · doing · describing and no sentence at all — which lives on the tray permanently, and three worked examples for your first presentation only: the dog ran · a cat sat · the red hen ran. Every verb is one a child can act, which is why “is” is gone, and “a rat digs” is gone with it — do not hand a child learning to encode a word whose last sound is spelled the way he would not spell it. After the presentation the material is his own strips. Both sheets go to the same tray and both need colour, so it is one print job. Laminate first, cut second.
16 pieces: 12 tokens on page 1, 4 cards at 190 × 60 mm on page 2.
11-backup-object-cards.pdf
The shelf wants 26 pieces of 16 different miniatures, and five of them — mop, peg, tin, bin, kit — are genuinely hard to buy. This is the photograph instead, printed at miniature scale, so no tray is ever held up by a shopping list. A card is 50 × 50 mm: it sits in a child's hand about the way a 3–6 cm object does, and it stands up in a tray rather than lying flat like a picture card. Print the ones you could not buy and drop them in the basket beside the real objects; print all of them and the shelf runs on paper. Sheet 1 carries 15, sheet 2 carries 11, and the order is the order of the miniatures table on the shelf page, duplicates adjacent — cut the sheet and the three cats come off it already stacked. Seven objects are wanted by two or three trays at the same time, which is the only reason any of them is printed more than once. No word is printed on a card, and not only by the throw-away rule: these are sound-box objects, the child names the picture himself, and a word on the card would hand him the answer. Four objects — sun, pot, pan and tin — have no photograph yet; their slots are drawn in amber dashes with the word on them and carry no ticks, because there is nothing to cut. The Midjourney prompts for those four are in scripts/curriculum/writing-shelf/MJ-PROMPTS-BACKUP-CARDS.md, and when the pictures land the slots fill themselves on a rerun. This is the only landscape card sheet in the set, for a dull reason: three columns of five 50 mm cards fill an A4 portrait page from top margin to bottom margin and leave nowhere for the footer, and the footer is the only place the tray allocation is written down.
26 cards at 50 × 50 mm, cut along every grey line, 15 on sheet 1 and 11 on sheet 2. These are NOT mounted — 50 mm is the finished card. The four empty squares at the end of sheet 2 cut into blank cards; keep them as spares.
12-word-card-tin.pdf
Tray 5 asks for “a tin of word cards from the readers, sorted: naming / doing / small words” and used to file it under Have, as though a tin of fifty cut and laminated word cards were something a classroom simply owns. It is not. This is that tin, printed. The 50 words are taken from the eleven Easy Readers and deduped — 20 naming, 9 doing, 21 small — so nothing on the sheet is a word the child has not already read in a book. The card is the heart-word card. 60 × 35 mm, unmounted, the same face at the same size on the same baseline as the five heart words on sheet D: on the sentence line the comes off the Tray 4 ring and pig comes out of this tin, and if they were different heights the line would read as two kinds of thing instead of one sentence. In the bottom-right corner of every card is the Tray 8 grammar symbol shrunk to about 4 mm — a black triangle for a naming word, a red circle for a doing word, a small grey dot for a small word, in the grammar pack’s own colours. It is the sort order: a card that falls out of the tin goes back in the right compartment without anyone reading it, and a year before Tray 8 the child is already handling the shapes. The last page is padded out with 13 blank cards, no word and no symbol, and they are the point — the tin is meant to grow as the readers do, and a teacher who has to go and find card stock will not grow it.
63 cards at 60 × 35 mm, cut along every grey line, 21 a sheet in three columns of seven. These are NOT mounted — 60 × 35 is the finished card. Seven rows and not eight: eight rows of 35 mm do fit an A4 page, but they leave 8.5 mm at each end and the footer cannot live there without breaking the 5.5 mm printer-safe margin. Sort by the corner symbol into the three compartments.
This is the rule that changed most between v1 and v2. Ten of v1's eleven child-facing sheets carried a footer, a label or a prompt on the piece the child holds. In v2 every instruction, tray name and size note sits outside the trim rectangle, on the paper that gets thrown away — the way the grammar tokens always did it. The chain cards and the dictation cards used to be four A6 cards tiling an A4 exactly, which left no waste to print a note on and nowhere for a cutting mark to live. They are now 80 × 120 mm and butted, so the sheet keeps a 25 mm side margin and a 28.5 mm head and foot: the black triangles and the one-line footer live there, on the paper that gets thrown away. Every cut line runs edge to edge and the blade splits it, so what survives onto a card is half of a 0.25 mm grey hairline — about an eighth of a millimetre, on a line that is the card edge anyway. Everything else you would have read off the sheet is on this page instead.
Everything on these sheets is black on white with one warm amber for the single meaningful thing — the letter that moved in a chain, the heart on a heart word, the midline you write on, the spare frame, the one line you cut. The grammar pack is the one exception: its red and dark blue are the Montessori grammar colours and mean something specific, so they stay.
Restock the letter tin. Four of v1's six chains could not be built from it. The six v2 chains need doubles of a b c d e g h i m n o p r t u — fifteen letters, thirty tiles — and nothing else.