Handwriting practice paper, A5
The four-line classroom ruling at A5, which is the right size for short, frequent practice rather than long sessions.
Opens with these settings already loaded. Change anything you like, then download as PDF, PNG or SVG.
Short sessions beat long ones
Handwriting improves with frequency rather than duration, and a full A4 page of practice is enough to produce fatigue and worse letterforms by the bottom of it. An A5 sheet is a manageable amount: five minutes, done properly, with the last line as good as the first. Finishing a small sheet also feels like completion, which matters more with a reluctant child than any feature of the ruling.
Sized for smaller hands and smaller tables
A5 suits a lap, a car, a kitchen table already holding other things. It also suits the physical scale of a young child, for whom an A4 sheet is genuinely large and requires moving the whole arm to reach the far corner. The 8 mm ruling here is a middle size; raise it for early writers and lower it as control develops.
Print two up and cut
Two A5 sheets fit on one A4 page under the printer driver's two pages per sheet option, so a stack costs half the paper. Check the driver is not also scaling, because the two settings are independent and a sheet that is both halved and shrunk will have a ruling that is no longer the size you chose. The A4 version is the full-size sheet.
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.