Dotted thirds paper
Two solid lines with a dotted line between them, dividing the writing space into thirds — the ruling Australian and New Zealand schools use.
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What dotted thirds are
The lowercase body occupies the middle third, and ascenders and descenders reach into the outer ones. The vocabulary differs from the American headline-midline-baseline description, but the geometry is identical, which is why an imported worksheet works perfectly well once the spacing is right. Australian teachers ask for dotted thirds; American ones ask for handwriting paper with a dotted midline. Same paper.
Matching the state handwriting styles
Each Australian state teaches its own script — Victorian Modern Cursive, NSW Foundation Style, Queensland Beginners Alphabet — and they differ in slope and in whether entry and exit strokes are taught from the start. What they all share is the dotted-thirds ruling, which is why the paper is effectively national even where the letterforms are not.
Sizing by year level
Foundation and Year 1 typically work at 18 to 24 mm between the solid lines, Year 2 at about 14 mm, Year 3 at 10 mm, after which children move to ordinary 8 mm feint ruling. Set the spacing to the year level rather than accepting a default, and open the descender skip if letters are crowding the line below — that is nearly always a spacing problem rather than a technique one.
Printing it accurately
This only measures correctly if your printer doesn't rescale the page. In the print dialog set Scale: 100% — not "Fit to page" or "Shrink oversized pages". If you're not sure it worked, print the calibration page, measure the ruler on it with a real ruler, and it will tell you exactly what your printer is doing to the page.