Lowercase letter tracing worksheets, for A4

Small letters are harder than capitals and this sheet is where that shows. Three things are happening at once: some letters reach the top line, some stop at the dashed midline, and five of them drop below the baseline — so the paper is doing as much teaching as the letters are. That is why the descender space is on rather than off, and why the midline is dashed rather than solid.

There are two more repeats of each letter here than on the capitals sheet, because small letters need them. b and d, p and q, n and h are pairs a child mixes up for a year or more, and the fix is not explanation but enough repetitions of each that the hand stops having to decide. The empty space at the end of every line is still where it is checked.

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.

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.

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.