First Grade Handwriting Worksheets
Ages 6 to 7 · letter body 7.94mm · pitch 23.82mm
First grade is where lowercase letters and word spacing matter more than letter shapes. A child who forms every letter well but runs words together is harder to read than one whose letters are untidy but spaced.
What most children can do at this stage
- Form most lowercase letters without a model
- Write on three-line ruling with letters mostly sitting on the baseline
- Copy a short sentence, though spacing usually needs teaching explicitly
- Write for fifteen to twenty minutes before quality drops noticeably
What usually goes wrong
- Words with no gaps between them. Spacing is a separate skill from letter formation and it needs teaching in its own right.
- Letters that float above the baseline or sink below it. Usually the ruling is too small for their current control rather than carelessness.
- Ascenders and descenders the same length as the letter body, which makes h look like n and p look like o.
How much practice
Fifteen minutes a day. Copying is more useful than tracing by this point, because tracing does not require the child to plan the movement.
Why the size matters
The sheets below use a letter body of 7.94mm. Every preset on this site follows the rule that published handwriting paper uses: the space above the midline, the letter body, and the space below the baseline are equal, so the line pitch is exactly three times the letter body. That is why the guides line up with the letters at any size.
Read next
Sheets for this stage
Print these as they are, or open any of them in the generator to change the text, the ruling or the size.