Copywork
NameDate
Trace each line, then write it on the line below.
The Print ShopHandwriting · Sentences and copywork
Copywork worksheets, for A4
A verse of a real poem, one line at a time. Each line is printed to read, then printed faintly twice to write over, then left as an empty ruled line. Copywork is the oldest handwriting exercise there is and still the best one once letters are formed.
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What is on this sheet
The faint lines are gray rather than dotted, which is the change that marks this sheet as the one after tracing. A dotted letter is a path to follow; a gray one is a shape to write over, and the pencil has to do the deciding. The empty line under each group is where it stops being a copy at all — and by then the eye has held the words long enough that the spelling has gone in as well.
The ⅜ ruling has a top line and a baseline and no midline at all. By this stage a child knows how tall a letter is and the paper stops telling them; what is left is a pair of lines to keep the writing straight, which is all a notebook gives you. It is the last ruling before ordinary lined paper, and copying a poem onto it is a fair test of whether someone is ready for that.
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, whether that is an ascender, a capital or a numeral. 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 Star”, Jane Taylor, 1806. Public domain.
Trace it, copy it, then write it alone
Every group on this page runs the same three steps: a solid model to look at, a dotted letter 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 dotted model can be 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.
Printing it on US Letter
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.
Every handwriting sheet
7 sheets, each one a page like this one. Nothing is locked and nothing needs an account.
Letters and numbers
The shapes everything else is built out of, a sheet each.
Words
Letters in an order, with spaces the right size between them.
Sentences and copywork
A whole line at a time, once the letters are no longer the work.