Sentence handwriting worksheets

A sentence brings in everything a letter sheet leaves out — a capital at the start, spaces between the words, and a period at the end — and those are the three things a child forgets first when they stop thinking about them. The model line at the top of each group is there to be looked at rather than skipped: the spacing is as much the lesson as the letters are.

Half an inch is the ruling where handwriting stops being about forming letters and starts being about writing a line without the page running out. If the sentences are being squeezed or the writing is drifting off the baseline, print the ⅝ or ¾ version from the builder instead — the sheet is identical apart from the size, which is the one thing worth changing at a time.

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 US Letter — 8.5 × 11 inches. 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 A4.