Dotted Letter Fonts

If you teach a classroom of budding young scholars, you realize that the first steps on lifelong learning involve the fine skill of reading and writing. One way to help young children learn how to write is to work with individual letters. A common method of teaching the individual letters is to provide practice pages that have the letters formed with a series of dots or dashes. The children can then follow the dashes or connect the dots to create the letters themselves.

If you need to create such practice pages, then finding a font that will do the dotted or dashed letters is important. Fortunately, there are many sources from which you can find such fonts. The following are just a few of the Web sites from which you can download the font for free:

• http://www.tooter4kids.com/Preschool/teaching_your_child_to_write.htm#Fonts1
• http://desktoppub.about.com/od/fonts/p/tracefont.htm
• http://www.bvfonts.com/fonts/fonts.php?show=free&by=date

If the above fonts aren't exactly what you want, you might also check out some specialty fonts or fonts that emulate old dot-matrix printers. There are more dots that make up the letters, and they are closer together. Here are a few places to look:

• http://www.free-fonts.com/matrix_fonts.html
• http://www.myfonts.com/browse/keyword/dot/

If you don't mind paying a few dollars, you can also find fonts like this at the following Web sites:

• http://kidsfonts.mivox.com
• http://www.fontmenu.com/site/_BlockLetters.html
• http://www.fonts4teachers.com
• http://www.netrover.com/~kingskid/Print_Fonts/font.htm

Make sure you take the time to look around and determine which font will work best for your needs. All of the fonts are slightly different, and will therefore produce different results.

You can even take your efforts a step further, and find places on the Web where the practice pages are already put together for you. Here are just a few of the many places where you can find such resources:

• http://www.handwritingforkids.com/handwrite/cursive.htm
• http://www.internet4classrooms.com/kplus_writing.htm

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (369) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003.