This is a really important procedure to teach at the beginning of the year. Teaching children how to layout their copy – both writing and maths is very important. By setting the expectation from the beginning children know what is expected.
For the perfect page – I use a spare copy and have 1 sheet for each child. We then go through how to layout the page step by step. After this we practice it in our copy. All children then have an example of what a ‘Perfect Page’ looks like and know the standard that is expected.
Each teacher/school may have a different layout but here is how I like my children to lay out their copies.
Writing Copies
When I taught 3rd class, the children ruled one line down (margin) and one line across the top. Then they wrote their title and date on the top line.
However for 5th class I’m changing this slightly – The children will have a double red line (using the top lines of the copybook and the margin line. Again they will write the date on the left and the title in the middle.
For Maths, I rule the copy in the same way for all class levels. However the amount of boxes that need to be skipped depends on the copies used. For our copies, we skip two lines in from the side and draw a red line down the page and two lines from the top and draw a line across. Then we skip 9 boxes across and draw a line and two boxes and draw a line.
