Printable handwriting worksheets

• Letter tracing — the whole alphabet — Every letter of the alphabet as a capital and a small letter, on ⅝-inch ruled paper: a solid model, two dotted letters to trace, and an empty space to write it alone.
• Capital letter tracing — The twenty-six capitals on ¾-inch handwriting paper, each traced and then written alone — the larger ruling for a hand that is still arriving.
• Small letter tracing — The twenty-six small letters on ⅝-inch paper with a dashed midline and room for descenders, traced twice and then written alone.
• Number formation, 0 to 9 — Every numeral from 0 to 9 on ¾-inch paper with a solid midline, one to a line: a model, four dotted numbers to trace, and one written alone.

• Sight words to trace and write — Twelve first sight words on ⅝-inch paper, each one traced once and then written from nothing — spelling and handwriting in the same three minutes.

• Sentences to trace and copy — Four short sentences on half-inch paper, each printed as a model, traced twice on the lines below, and then written on a line of its own.
• Copywork — a poem to copy out — A verse of “The Star” on ⅜-inch transitional paper: the line printed, two gray copies to write over, and an empty line to write it from nothing.

Every sheet here runs the same three steps, and they are meant to be done in order. A solid model to look at. A dotted one to trace over. An empty space where nobody is helping. Tracing on its own practices following a line; the empty space is where a child practices writing, and it is the reason these pages are worth more than a sheet of dotted letters twice the length.

How far along that progression a page sits is a setting rather than a different worksheet. The model can be dotted, dashed, hollow, gray or left off altogether, and each thing can be written anywhere from once to eight times. Turn the progression off and every repeat is drawn the same way, which is the sheet for a child who is still tracing and not yet ready to be left on their own.

Cursive is the same progression again in a joined hand, and it starts where this one did — at the letter, because a cursive a is not a printed a with a tail. What it adds is the sheet printing never needed: the joins themselves, six families of them, practiced as pairs because the stroke between two letters is only correct with both letters there.

There are three cursive models on offer rather than one. The looped hand an American school teaches, the unlooped one that lifts the pencil after certain letters, and the fully joined hand a British school teaches disagree about which letters join at all, so which one a child is learning is a question worth being asked rather than guessed.

And there is a shelf for the child who can form every letter and still hands in a page nobody can read — the strokes the letters are made of, the size of a letter against its neighbors, the space between words, and staying neat when the writing has to keep up.

The copywork sheet above is a poem, and the passage on it is a setting rather than the sheet. A few hundred are shipped — the Psalms, the Gospels and the Proverbs listed first, then the founding documents, the fables, the openings of a dozen novels and the poems — and any of them prints at any of these rulings, in any of the trace styles. Scripture has a shelf of its own because it is what people search for, not because it is a different kind of sheet.

This week’s spellings off a note from school, a name to practice, a verse to copy out — the builder takes a typed or pasted list and prints it as any of the sheets above, on any ruling, at any size. The settings travel in the link, so a sheet you make can be sent to another family as it stands.

The Name: line is printed blank and filled in with a pencil. Nothing is uploaded to make a sheet and there is nowhere in a shared link to put a child’s name — see what we don’t collect.