Are you spending your evenings writing welcome letters to parents, carefully ruling seating charts, designing award certificates, and creating learning center signs? Why reinvent the wheel? All those printable documents are available online at the click of a mouse. This week, Education World tells you where to find them! Included: A list of the best sources for often-used and hard-to-find teacher templates.

Do you find yourself spending way too much out-of-class time creating printable classroom resources? Do your learning center signs look shabby next to those of the team's resident creative genius? Does the thought of making even one more name tag cause you to think longingly of a career in sanitation control? Are you ready to hand in your resignation -- but don't have the energy to write it? It's probably time to look into templates!

A template, according to Whatis?com "is a form, mold, or pattern used as a guide to making something." In the classroom, a template can be anything from a traceable oak tag elephant to a field trip permission form.

Some templates -- such as most award certificates, student progress updates, and seating charts -- are available in word processing documents. You can modify and individualize those before saving or printing them.

Other templates are designed to be printed and used "as is." You can make modifications, such as adding a specific name or date, after printing the product. Most non-modifiable documents are created in PDF (portable document format), a file format that has the advantage of maintaining all the formatting of the original document.

You can find many templates for forms, documents, letters, and classroom visual aids -- somewhere -- in either a word processing document or PDF form. Whether you're looking for a printable handwriting guide or a modifiable IEP form, you'll most likely find what you need at one of the sites listed below.

As you select the resources that best serve your needs, be aware that, although all the templates discussed here are free and none of the sites require registration, some sites will ask you to register. If you don't choose to do so, simply click Cancel when the registration window opens, and download will continue. Note that sometimes the registration window opens behind the browser window -- and you cannot see it. If a download seems particularly slow, look for the word Enter in the task bar at the bottom of your screen and click it to bring the registration window to the front. Then either register or cancel to continue downloading the document.

MODIFIABLE TEMPLATES

You can modify most of the documents found at the sites discussed in this section before printing them, although you might find some non-modifiable materials as well.

Forms and Letters
This section of Teacher Tools contains more than 80 templates for documents most teachers use every day. The downloadable templates are listed in four categories: Discipline, Academic, Communication, and Other. Documents include behavior logs and journals, detention forms, hall passes, attendance forms, parent letters, special services referral letters, progress report forms and letters, book report forms, assignment sheets, a sub note, project planning guide, an IEP form, and much, much more! Less frequently used -- but always useful -- templates at this site include a birthday card, bingo cards, a book report bookmark, memo pad, thank-you note, and graph paper in a variety of sizes.

Forms and Testing
First-grade teacher Jill Perkins provides a number of useful -- and sometimes hard-to-find -- templates, including a weekly lesson plan, ABC flash cards, a handwriting practice page, a 100s chart, and a classroom grading aid. You will find most templates in both non-modifiable (PDF) and modifiable (Microsoft Word) formats. The site also includes templates for Dolch flash cards for first, second, and third grade.

QLS Mathematics
This UK site offers a variety of printable math-related resources, such as a 100 square, a number line, a 0-10 line, and so on, at both primary and secondary levels. The planning sheet templates are useful for any teacher. The Observation Lesson Teaching Checklist should be especially useful for administrators.

PRINTABLE TEMPLATES

Many of the templates found at the sites mentioned in this section are PDF files. To view these files, you'll need Acrobat Reader, which you can download free from the Adobe Acrobat site.

Laura Candler's File Cabinet
North Carolina educator Laura Candler created this extensive selection of printable teacher resources, catalogued under easily accessed headings. Odds and Ends, for example, offers a classroom incident report form, an e-mail project permission form, a missing homework notification form, behavior modification tools, and much, much more. Graphic Organizers includes such commonly used organizers as a sequencing map, a KWL chart, and a Venn diagram. You will also find an assortment of student work sheets for all subject areas and for a variety of learning center activities.

Printables and Worksheets
A to Z Teacher Stuff offers a variety of printable work sheets, including 100s grids, shape books, maps, a metric converter work sheet, and more. This is also the place to go for colorful printable center signs.

Teaching Extras for the Classroom
ABC Teach provides lots of printable teacher resources, including learning center signs, desktop name tags, hall passes, homework reminders, flash cards, assignment forms, thank-you notes, and more. All are attractive and colorful. The site is very slow to load, however. If a page takes too long to open, try clicking Stop in the navigation toolbar. Sometimes it speeds up the process!

School Forms Tool Kit
Family Education.com provides a bus change form, an authorization for dispensing medication form, a field trip permission form, and an all-purpose school note. These printable forms are designed for parents, but teachers can use them too!

SMALL SITES, SPECIALIZED TEMPLATES

If you're looking for printable (but not modifiable!) outline maps to use with your students, check out Outline Maps from Houghton Mifflin's Education Place, Blank and Outline Maps from About.com, or Maps from ABC Teach.

Two additional sites are worth mentioning, although they do not offer templates as such. They do, however, provide excellent examples of documents that teachers and schools might find useful. The Bellingham (Washington) Schools' Copyright Permission Letter clearly demonstrates the elements such a letter should contain. Copy and paste the information to a new document to create your own letter. You may also use the Spartanburg (South Carolina) School District's WebQuest Template to create your own WebQuest template. The site includes extensive directions for creating WebQuests.