Psalm 23 copywork worksheet, for A4

The whole psalm rather than a verse of it, and that is what decides the ruling: at six hundred characters this needs about thirty lines, so quarter-inch rules are the only ones that fit the lot on a single sheet. It is a page for a child who is writing fluently and wants a real piece of work — twenty minutes rather than five — and it is worth saying that out loud before handing it over.

There is nothing dotted and nothing gray on this sheet. A reader at this stage does not need a model to write over; what they need is the line above to look at and an empty rule to fill, which is exactly what a page of copywork is. If a lighter version is wanted, the builder will set the same psalm with a gray model and fewer lines to a page, on any of the twelve rulings.

The passage is Psalm 23, printed exactly as the translation has it — the punctuation, the spelling and the capitals are the source’s rather than ours, which is a condition of using the name and is also what a child copying it should be copying.

Scripture: World English Bible Updated (public domain) · worldenglish.bible

This page is one sheet out of a family that can print thousands.Psalm 23 sits in the same passage picker as the Gettysburg Address and “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat” — a few hundred entries, Scripture listed first — and any of them can be set at any of the twelve rulings, in any of the five trace styles, in print or in cursive. Or paste your own verse and get the same sheet.

The settings travel in the address bar rather than on a server, so the builder link at the top of the page opens the bench on exactly this sheet, and a sheet you make can be sent to another family as it stands. There is nowhere in it to put a child’s name — see what we don’t collect.

This sheet is set for A4 — 210 × 297 mm. Paper size is not a preference on a ruled sheet: sent to a printer loaded with something else, the browser shrinks the page to fit, and a ruling that has been shrunk is no longer the size it was chosen for. So there is a second copy of this sheet, measured for US Letter.