Handwriting warm-up worksheets, for A4

A warm-up is not for a child who cannot form letters. It is for one who can, and whose letters go to pieces halfway down a page: the strokes here are the ones every letter is two or three of, and drawing each one evenly to the end of a line is what a hand has to be able to do before it can write a paragraph. Two lines of each is a few minutes, which is what the copybooks opened every lesson with for a century.

The two loops are on this sheet and not on the pre-writing one because they need somewhere to go. A tail loop drops below the baseline, and half-inch paper with a tail space has room for it where a page for a four-year-old has no use for one. They come last, in the order the strokes are taught: straight before curved, lifted before continuous, and the two a joined hand needs at the end. Eighteen rows at half an inch is two pages on either stock.

The rules are drawn as real strokes at real sizes, and what goes on them is set to the ruling: a letter stands on the baseline and reaches the top line, and a stroke pattern is drawn between the same lines the letter it belongs to would be. 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.

Practice only improves writing when the child judges it. A row of the same letter written ten times is ten letters; a row written five times and then looked at, with the best one circled, is a decision about what a good letter is — and the decision is what carries to the next page, not the repetitions. Copying is the weakest way to learn a letter, writing it from memory after looking at a model is stronger, and judging your own against the model is the step that makes the practice count.

So use any sheet on this shelf the same way, whether or not it says so. Look at the model together and say what makes it right — where it starts, where it stops, how tall it stands. Write, without tracing where there is nothing to trace. Then choose: which one is closest, and why. The circle-your-best sheet makes that the whole exercise; on the others it is the last minute, and the minute that matters.

This sheet is set for A4 — 210 × 297 mm. Paper size is not a preference on a ruled 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.