Handwriting practice paper, A4
The classroom four-line ruling on A4, adjustable to whatever height your school or child needs.
Opens with these settings already loaded. Change anything you like, then download as PDF, PNG or SVG.
What the four lines are for
From the top: a headline that tall letters reach, a dotted midline that most lowercase letters touch, a baseline everything sits on, and a descender space below it for the tails of g, j, p, q and y. The dotted midline is the working part. It is what tells a child that an a is half the height of a b without anyone having to explain it.
Rulings outside the US
The US grade-by-grade system does not travel. UK infant schools commonly use narrower rulings and often add a fourth line for descenders in the early years. Australian schools use their own state cursive systems, and New South Wales Foundation and Victorian Modern Cursive both have specific proportions. Because the ruling here is adjustable rather than fixed to a named system, you can measure a page from the exercise book you are actually using and reproduce it.
Start larger than seems necessary
Fine motor control develops later than the desire to write, and a child struggling to stay inside a small ruling is fighting the paper rather than learning letterforms. Start well above what looks right for the age and come down as the writing steadies. Going back up a size for a while is a normal part of the process, not a setback. Dotted thirds is the common Australian variant if that is what you need.
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.