Chinese Worksheet Templates for Teachers

Start from the template, not from the blank page

Most of the paper a Chinese teacher produces falls into six recurring shapes: a character list, a pinyin writing grid, a character writing grid, a set of flash cards, a reading handout, and a test paper. Between them they account for a term's worth of printing. Preparing each one from scratch is what consumes the evenings; preparing the same six shapes repeatedly from a fixed template takes a fraction of the time and, more importantly, produces material that looks like a single consistent series rather than six unrelated documents.

The single largest saving is the pinyin. Every one of the six shapes needs characters annotated with their readings, and doing that by hand is slow, error-prone and worst exactly where it matters most, because the characters that carry more than one reading are the ones a beginner most needs to get right. The workflow described on this page assumes you produce the annotated text with the online pinyin annotation tool and then lay it out in a word processor or a design tool. Build each template once, keep the source file, and afterwards preparing a worksheet is a matter of replacing the text and re-exporting.

Throughout, two settings deserve to be fixed by departmental habit rather than chosen per sheet: the pinyin size relative to the character size, and the pinyin colour. If those two vary between colleagues and between weeks, students receive a visually inconsistent set of sheets all term, and the sheets begin to look like material the class is being handed rather than a body of material the class is building. A written convention — for example pinyin at roughly sixty per cent of the character size, in a dark colour that survives greyscale photocopying — is worth agreeing on once.

1. Annotated character lists

The most-used sheet in any Chinese class: a list of the characters or words for the unit, each with its reading printed above it. Its purpose is to let a learner who cannot yet read the characters work with the vocabulary independently, and to give a reliable pronunciation reference to carry home.

What goes on the sheet

• Pinyin directly above its character, aligned in columns. Do not print the pinyin as a separate line beneath, because a line of romanisation beneath a line of characters forces the reader to count across to find which syllable belongs to which character — and for a class of mixed ability, that is where the errors start.
• Words rather than isolated characters, wherever possible. A character acquires its reading and much of its meaning in combination, so 打车 and 打扫 are learnable while 打 alone is not. Keep a short separate block for the characters that must be learned alone.
• A translation column on the far right, aligned and in a lighter weight. The glosses should be positioned so that a student can fold the paper and cover them for self-testing.
• Room for a written column at the end if the sheet is also a practice sheet. Two blank ruled columns let the same paper serve as a list and as a first copying exercise.

Preparation

Type the vocabulary into a plain text file, one item per line, in the order the class will meet it. Paste the whole list into the tool, annotate with tones on, and check the flagged polyphonic characters — the ones that recur in lists are 长, 行, 了, 着, 得, 分, 干, 数 and 差, all listed with their readings in the polyphonic characters reference. Export to Word, then apply the template: three columns, consistent row height, pinyin about sixty per cent of the character size.

Print and use

Print single-sided on plain paper; these sheets are written on. Issue the annotated list before the class reads anything, not after, so that the first encounter with the text is not blocked by character recognition. In class, use it for choral reading with the class following the pinyin, for a quick reading quiz where you point at a word and a student reads it, and — the most efficient use — as a self-check sheet during a task, so that students stop asking you for pronunciations and start resolving them from the paper.

2. Pinyin writing grids: four lines, three spaces

Pinyin writing practice needs a different rule from character practice, and the standard solution is the four-line three-space grid: four horizontal guide lines creating three bands. Teach the bands explicitly before students use the sheet, because the grid only works if its logic is understood.

• The middle band is the body zone. Letters such as a, e, m, n, o, r, u, w, x and z sit entirely within it.
• The upper band is the ascender zone. The tall strokes of b, d, h, k, l and t reach into it, as does the dot of i and j.
• The lower band is the descender zone. The tails of g, p, q and y drop into it, and so does the second element of a multiplied letter such as the form of ü.
• Tone marks are written in the upper band, above the letter they belong to. This matters more than it looks: a tone mark placed inside the body zone collides with the letter and is the most common cause of illegible handwriting in beginner pinyin.

Stroke conventions worth insisting on

Insist on a small number of rules and ignore the rest, because over-correction on letter forms produces hesitant writers. Vertical strokes are written from top to bottom; round letters are drawn anticlockwise from the top; the dot of i and j is written last, after the stem. For ü, write the u and then the two dots. Write the letters left to right without lifting the pen where a letter allows it, and leave the tone mark to the end of the whole syllable, once the correct main vowel has been identified — this last point is the one that consolidates the tone-placement rule, so it is worth the extra time.

Print and use

Set the guide lines in a light grey so they recede behind the writing and photocopy without smudging; between 8 mm and 10 mm between lines is workable for most hands, and larger for younger students. Leave the first row of the grid filled in as a model, the second row in faint grey for tracing, and the rows below blank. In class, use one grid per new sound group rather than a full alphabet page: a sheet of forty letters is busywork, while a sheet of eight target syllables written four times each is practice. If your students are also learning character-based pinyin rules, the systematic version of them is in the pinyin chart, and the contrasts that handwriting practice cannot fix — the retroflex series, the nasal finals — are set out in commonly mispronounced sounds.

3. Character-writing grids

For characters, the standard is a square divided by a light cross, sometimes with both diagonals as well. The cross version — the square divided into four — is the workhorse; the version with diagonals is useful for the first few months, when students are still judging the centre and the diagonals of a character such as 人 or 大. Switching to plain squares once the centre is established keeps the page calmer and discourages students from drawing characters to fit the guide lines rather than to fill the square.

Preparation

Work out the stroke count and the stroke order before you build the sheet. Order the practice so that components are practised before the characters that contain them, and group characters that share a component on the same page, so the page teaches a rule rather than a list. Then decide the sheet's structure: one model row, one tracing row, two blank rows is the standard and it is the right one, because the model supplies the reference, the trace supplies the motor pattern, and the blank rows expose whether the pattern has been retained.

Print and use

Squares of 15 mm to 18 mm suit most adult and teenage hands; smaller squares force students to write at a size they cannot yet control, and oversized squares make the character look lost and discourage attention to proportion. Print the grid lines at about twenty per cent grey. These sheets are the one type worth printing in larger quantity and keeping in a folder, because having a stack of pre-printed grids removes the friction that otherwise makes writing practice get dropped from a busy lesson. In class, use them immediately after the character is first presented, in a short burst — four characters, four rows each — rather than as a long writing session at the end.

4. Flash cards

Flash cards do the work that a worksheet cannot: retrieval under time pressure, in a group, with the answer physically hidden until the moment it is revealed. The design decisions are about card size and page count, and both follow from how the cards will be used.

Layout

• Six to eight cards per A4 or Letter page for single characters, four for words or short phrases. Fewer and larger cards are easier to handle in front of a class; more and smaller cards are better for paired work at a desk.
• Card size of roughly 60 mm by 90 mm is the useful default — large enough to read from the back of a room, small enough to shuffle and hold.
• Annotate every card, with the pinyin above the character. The pinyin is what makes a card usable by a student who has not yet learned the character, and it is what allows the same deck to serve pair work without an adult present.
• For recall decks, print the pinyin on the reverse. The easy way to get this without a duplex printer is a second page of cards carrying only the pinyin in the same positions, printed on the back of the character page before cutting. Work through the alignment on one test sheet first: cut corners drift from page to page.
• Add a small unit or lesson code in a corner. Decks get mixed within a term, and a code in the corner is what makes reassembly possible.

Print and use

Print on heavier stock — around 200 gsm is enough to prevent show-through without jamming an ordinary printer — and laminate the decks that will be reused, especially any that go home with students. Cut with a guillotine rather than scissors if the sheets are destined for a staff room, because a stack of identically sized cards is much easier to store than a stack of slightly irregular ones.

Classroom uses that justify the preparation time: character-to-pinyin matching, where students pair a character card with its reading card; memory pairs, with two copies of each card face down; rapid recall, where cards are shown one at a time and the class reads them chorally at speed; word building, where students are given single-character cards and asked to place two together to form a word and say it; and sentence building, where a small group builds a sentence from word cards and reads it aloud. The last two are the ones that turn a deck from a drill into language use, and both benefit from a set that includes some function words as separate cards.

5. Annotated reading handouts

A reading handout is a passage plus annotation plus a small amount of scaffolding, and it differs from a worksheet in that its purpose is comprehension rather than production. The annotation decisions here are about density: annotate everything on the first encounter, and less on the second, so that the same passage supports two lessons instead of one.

The structure that works

• Title and a one-line context sentence in the students' first language. Context costs almost nothing and prevents a passage from being read as a puzzle.
• The annotated passage, with pinyin at about sixty per cent of the character size. Line spacing generous enough that the pinyin and the characters do not crowd each other.
• Four to six glossed words below the passage, each given as it appeared in the text, with its pinyin and a brief gloss — the words the class will meet again rather than the words that happen to be difficult.
• Two comprehension questions, one literal and one inferential, both annotated as well, because a question is one-off text and cannot be learned from repetition within the page.
• A target-sound line. Three or four words from the passage that share the sound the class is working on, lifted out for choral practice.

Print single-sided with a wide right-hand margin, so the margin can be used for glossing during the lesson. The second version of the same handout, for the following lesson, should have the pinyin faded rather than removed: shrink it and set it in a light grey, so the passage is read again with the support present but unappealing. The reasoning behind that progression, and the signals that it is time to remove the pinyin entirely, are set out in the graded reading guide.

6. Annotated test papers

Tests need a more careful decision than any other sheet here, because annotation changes what is being measured. The governing principle is to annotate the frame of the test and not the content.

• Annotate the instructions, the worked example and the answer options. An instruction line appears once and is usually the most complex sentence on the page; if it is not readable, the test measures literacy rather than the material taught. Answer options fall into the same category.
• Do not annotate the character or word that the item is testing. If the item asks students to read 长, printing its reading above it supplies the answer. Annotate the surrounding sentence and leave the target bare.
• Keep a practice version and an assessment version of the same paper. The practice version is fully annotated, including the target items; the assessment version uses the frame-only rule. Producing both from one source takes a few minutes and resolves the tension entirely.
• For reading-comprehension sections, annotate the passage but not the questions, when the questions are genuinely testing comprehension — and annotate both when the section is testing vocabulary recognition. Decide which before building the page, because the two versions look identical afterwards.
• Choose a pinyin colour that survives greyscale copying. A light colour looks fine on screen and disappears in the office photocopier, which is exactly where assessment papers get reproduced.

The batch workflow for this — type the whole paper as one text file, annotate it in a single pass, then delete the unwanted readings in the word processor — is described in adding pinyin to worksheets and tests.

Organising a term's worth of material

Once the templates exist, the remaining problem is retrieval: finding the right sheet in the right version, and letting a colleague use it without you in the room. Three habits solve almost all of it.

Naming

Use a fixed pattern that includes the unit, the lesson, the template type, the version and the script: U3-L2-characterlist-v2-simp, U3-L2-flashcards-simp, U3-L2-readinghandout-faded-simp. Three things to avoid: spaces in filenames, which break on some systems; dates instead of version numbers, since nobody can tell which of two dates is current; and the word "final", which always acquires a successor.

Archiving

One folder per unit, containing subfolders by template type, and — this is the part that usually gets skipped — the source text file next to every exported PDF. The PDF is what the class gets; the plain text is what lets anyone re-annotate, re-level or re-export next year without retyping the passage. Keep a one-page index per unit listing what exists, which version is current, and what still needs writing. For material reused across years, keep a second copy of the source text with the year stripped out, so that a sheet does not carry a stale date into the next cohort.

Sharing with colleagues

Two things make a shared folder usable rather than merely large. First, the naming convention has to be agreed and followed by everyone, because a folder with three naming styles is a folder nobody searches. Second, the settings have to be shared: pinyin size relative to characters, pinyin colour, grid line weights, square sizes, paper size and margins. Agree those once, write them down, and put the note at the top of the shared folder. Where a colleague uses a different reading from you for a polyphonic character, resolve it through the reference rather than by preference — which is the subject of teaching pinyin in the classroom — and record the decision in the same note so that the next person to prepare the sheet does not have to reopen it.

Producing the annotated text for every template

Five of the six templates above depend on the same operation: putting correct pinyin above a set of characters at a size you control. That is what the online pinyin annotation tool produces. Type or paste the text — a vocabulary list, a passage, a set of test items, the words for a flash card deck — one item per line so the output is easy to split, annotate with tones on, and export to Word or PDF. Characters with more than one reading are flagged instead of being silently resolved, so the readings that would otherwise be taught wrongly can be corrected in a click before anything is printed, which is the step that makes a shared materials library trustworthy. Because the tool works in the browser with nothing to install, a colleague receiving nothing but your plain text file can reproduce exactly the sheet you made.

For the classroom situations in which each template is used, continue to teaching pinyin in the classroom. For longer annotated reading material, see graded Chinese reading practice, and for the printed-and-bound version of a child's story, making your first bilingual book. Everything else is indexed in the Tutorials.