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Printables for 5 and under
Pre-school sheets: early letters and shapes, picture routines and simple charts for children getting ready for their first classroom.
12 topics · 93 printable sheets
Printables in this section
5 sheetsBack to school checklists
Free printable back to school checklists, one for each stage from starting Reception to the first week of secondary. Uniform, equipment, the parent admin, the routine reset and the conversations worth having first.
12 sheetsLined and grid paper
Eleven kinds of A4 paper to print at home: ruled, wide ruled, handwriting lines, squared, graph, dot grid, isometric, draw and write, and Cornell notes. Download one sheet or the whole pack.
6 sheetsRoutine charts
Six free morning and bedtime routine charts to print on A4, in a colourful design and in pink and blue, with picture steps a child can follow before they can read and a full week of boxes to tick.
2 sheetsBabysitter and emergency information sheets
Two free printable sheets for the times somebody else is looking after your child: a babysitter pack for the evening, and an emergency contacts and medical information sheet to keep on hand.
7 sheetsChristmas planning sheets
Seven free printable Christmas planners. A budget, a present tracker, a food plan, two advent calendars, a countdown chart and a letter to Father Christmas, all sized for A4.
18 sheetsColouring pages
Eighteen free printable colouring pages, cats, dogs, sea creatures, diggers, tractors, cars, unicorns, shapes, numbers and fruit, all black and white line art, ready for A4.
19 sheetsChristmas colouring pages and crafts
Nineteen free printable Christmas sheets. Eleven colouring pages from simple to detailed, four cards to colour and fold, a Father Christmas mask, gingerbread chains and paper chain strips.
4 sheetsColouring bookmarks
Four free printable sheets of colouring bookmarks, sixteen in total. Two sheets of simple designs for younger children and two of detailed patterns for older ones. Colour them in, cut them out and use them.
5 sheetsPaper aeroplane templates
Five free printable paper aeroplane templates with the fold lines already on the paper. Numbered creases on page one, big illustrated steps on page two, from a four step beginner plane up to a stunt plane with adjustable tabs.
7 sheetsChore charts and pocket money sheets
Seven free printable jobs charts and a pocket money tracker. Three age bands in two versions, one with pocket money attached and one without, so you can pick the approach that suits your house.
5 sheetsLetter tracing practice sheets
Five free A4 letter tracing sheets, all 26 letters, with a warm up page of lines, waves and loops first. Each letter has a picture word and a dotted start point, so children can see where to begin.
3 sheetsShape tracing and pre-writing sheets
Three free printable packs for little hands: shape tracing, pre-writing line patterns and a cut out matching set. Twelve pages in total, all A4 landscape.
Getting ready for school without doing school
The year before reception is when the pressure creeps in, usually via somebody at the gate whose child is apparently already reading. Ignore that. At this age the useful things are short, physical and cheerful: holding a pencil without white knuckles, recognising the shape of their own name, sitting still for four minutes because something interesting is happening.
Tracing sheets are good for exactly one reason. They build the hand control that writing needs later. Five minutes is plenty, and the moment it stops being fun you have got everything you were going to get.
The unglamorous alternative
Threading pasta. Peeling stickers. Playing with dough. Cutting up junk mail. Doing up buttons on a coat while you stand there pretending not to be in a hurry.
All of it does the same job as a worksheet, most children will do it for longer, and none of it costs any ink. If tracing sheets are a fight in your house, do these instead and lose absolutely nothing.
What schools actually ask for
Ask a reception teacher and the list is consistent and dull: a coat they can manage, shoes on the right feet, a lunch box they can open, hands washed, and the confidence to tell an adult who isn’t you that something is wrong.
Reading, writing and phonics are what reception is for. Arriving already able to do them helps far less than people imagine.
Five minutes, then stop
Anything involving a pencil at this age wants to be short and to end while it’s still going well. A page finished under duress buys you a child who doesn’t want the next one.
Stopping early is the technique. I still have to talk myself into it.
Big before small
Children form letters from the shoulder before the fingers. Chalk on a patio, a finger in a tray of flour, an arm-sized letter on the back of wallpaper. All of it builds the control that a pencil needs later, and none of it feels like work. The shape tracing sheets are the paper version of the same idea, and they come after the flour rather than before it.