Uppercase letter tracing worksheets, for A4

Capitals are usually the first letters a child writes, and not because they come first in the alphabet: every one of them is made of straight lines and simple curves that start at the top and finish at the bottom, with nothing that has to be joined and nothing that drops below the line. If handwriting is going badly, this is the page to go back to.

The ruling is a size larger than the ⅝ paper most of Grade 1 works on. That is deliberate rather than a concession — a child whose fine motor control is still arriving writes large, and paper that asks them to write smaller than they can control teaches them that handwriting is something they are bad at. Drop to ⅝ when the letters stop touching the top line by accident.

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.