A quick route to a usable worksheet
Open a picture, choose a preset that limits colour and detail, set the paper size and export a PDF. The name, class, date and title fields are editable before you export, so the sheet that comes out of the printer is the sheet you hand out.
The presets exist because the useful settings for a classroom are not the useful settings for a painter. A worksheet wants fewer colours, larger regions and thicker lines than a reference guide does, and starting from a preset means not rediscovering that every term.
- A4 and US Letter layouts, at true physical sizes.
- Square, hexagon and true triangular worksheets.
- A colour answer sheet and a numbered legend.
- A large-mass block-in when the class is painting one picture together.
A worked example: one picture, thirty pupils
A Year 4 class painting the same photograph of a harbour. The picture is chosen for hard edges and separated colour, because a soft gradient sky produces regions nobody can see the boundary of.
Detail goes low and the colour count goes to eight, which is the number of pots that fit on a table without anyone reaching. Shape Colouring with hexagons rather than Contour Painting, because a repeating tiling gives every child cells of a similar size, and a contour guide gives one child the sky and another child forty small shapes.
Paper is A4 at 100 per cent, line weight one step above the default so it survives a photocopier. The answer sheet is printed once in colour and put on the wall rather than thirty times, which is where most of the printing budget for an activity like this usually goes.
The readability check is the part worth watching. It flags any region too small to carry a legible number at the size you chose, and if it flags a lot of them the answer is to lower the detail rather than to print it anyway and spend the lesson explaining what a smudge was meant to be.
Adjust the challenge
The same photograph can produce a page of twelve large shapes or a page of three hundred small ones, and the control is the same one either way. Lower detail and fewer colours make an activity a five year old can finish. Higher detail gives a confident learner something that takes an hour.
That is genuinely useful for a mixed class, because it means differentiation without preparing different activities. The same picture at three settings gives three sheets that look like they belong together, so nobody is holding the obviously easy one.
Pacyra is a creative tool. It is not an assessment product and it is not a therapeutic one.
Printing, and what goes wrong
Export as PDF for anything going to a printer. The page comes out at the size it claims, with margins a school printer will not crop into, and the numbers are sized to the shape that carries them rather than set at one size for the whole sheet.
Two things reliably go wrong and both are avoidable. Scaling a PDF to fit at print time undoes the physical sizing the guide was checked against, so print at 100 per cent. And a guide built at A4 and then enlarged to A3 for a display leaves the line weight too thin, so build it at the size you are going to print.
For a wall display or anything larger than paper, the projector view throws the guide onto the surface itself and lines it up against four corners you place by hand.
Keep the reference local
The photograph is decoded, analysed and exported in the browser on the machine in front of you. There is no endpoint that accepts one, so a picture of a pupil, a family or a school trip has nowhere to travel to.
This is the part that decides whether the tool is usable at all in a school. A photograph of a child is not something to hand to a third party in order to get a worksheet back, and the safeguarding conversation about it is one you should not have to have. Accounts hold profile, quota, purchase and non-image preset data, and nothing about the picture.
Responsibility for having permission to use an image stays with you, as it would with any classroom resource.