Letter families handwriting worksheets, for A4

Letters are taught in families because a child who can make one stroke well has every letter that starts with it: the curve that begins c, o, a, d, g and q is one movement, learned once. It is also the best answer anyone has to b and d. A letter met beside the ones it is built like is mixed up less with the one it merely looks like — b is an arch letter, made like h and p, and d is a round letter, made like a and g, and on this sheet they are rows apart.

There are no headings between the families; the paper marks the break instead. A family with an odd number of letters ends with a row half empty — f alone at the end of the round letters, k alone at the end of the arch letters — and the next row starts a new stroke. So every letter on a line starts the same way as the one beside it, which is what the instruction at the top says, and it holds on every line. Twenty-six letters written four times each is two pages of ⅝ paper.

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.