Cursive copywork worksheets, for A4

The ⅜ ruling has a top line and a baseline and no midline at all, which is as much help as an ordinary notebook gives. Cursive at this size is a fair test of whether the hand has actually learned the letters or has been copying large ones: loops close up, the joins get shorter than the letters, and anything a child was drawing rather than writing stops working. If it falls apart here, the ⅝ version of the same sheet is one setting away.

The faint gray lines are the step after dotted and dashed. A gray line is a shape to write over rather than a path to follow, so the pencil is making every decision and the model is only confirming them. By the empty line at the bottom of each group the poem has been read four times, which is the other half of what copywork has always been for — a child copying Lear is reading Lear.

The rules are drawn as real strokes at real sizes, and what is written is set to them: the tallest thing on a line stands on the baseline and reaches the top line, and the loops below it are drawn full depth rather than clipped where the paper runs out. The type size is worked out from the ruling and from the font’s own measured proportions rather than picked to look about right. Put a ruler on it. The ruling is the size it says it is.

“The Owl and the Pussy-cat”, Edward Lear, 1871. Public domain.

Joined writing has no single correct form. The hand taught in an American classroom loops its ascenders and joins out of every letter; the unlooped model draws the same letters without the loops and lifts the pencil after b, f, g, j, p, q, s and y; the hand a British primary school teaches leads into every letter with a stroke from the baseline and joins all twenty-six. This sheet is set in the first of those, because a shelf has to be set in something.

If your child is being taught one of the others, the builder prints this same sheet in it — and the joins change with it, because which letters join is written into the font rather than into the worksheet. That is also why a join is practiced as a pair here rather than as a letter with a tail: the stroke between two letters is only correct in the company of both of them.

Every group on this page runs the same three steps: a solid model to look at, a model to trace over, and an empty space where nobody is helping. That last one is the part that teaches — tracing practices following a line, and writing from nothing practices writing. A sheet of nothing but dotted letters is a sheet a child can finish without ever having made a letter themselves.

How far along that progression a sheet sits is a setting rather than a different worksheet. The model can be dotted, dashed, hollow, gray or left off entirely; the number of repeats moves between one and eight; and every ruling in the shop — the five handwriting sizes, the three notebook rules, squares, dots and triangles — works with any of them.

This sheet is set for A4 — 210 × 297 mm. Paper size is not a preference on a handwriting 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, ruled identically and measured for US Letter.