Cursive Worksheets for Grade 2

What is on this page

Three of the 39 sheets on this page were written for grade 2 specifically, and 36 were written for a neighbouring grade and still suit it — a hand that can form a letter can form it a year early or a year late. The skills covered at grade 2, largest first, are Lowercase Letters (26), Uppercase Letters (9), Letter Connections (2), Themed Worksheets (1) and Word Practice (1).

Across those sheets a grade 2 student works through 234 exercise blocks and 313 ruled lines: 79 tracing rows, 79 copying rows, 39 free-writing rows with nothing printed and 37 model letterforms to study. The proportion matters more than the total — a year with a lot of tracing and little free writing is a year still building the movement, and one with more free writing than tracing is a year using it.

The letterforms a grade 2 sheet covers

35 distinct letters have a sheet at grade 2, touching five of the five stroke families — the undercurve family, the loop family, the oval family, the slant letters and the mixed strokes. Letters are grouped by the movement that starts them rather than alphabetically, which is why b sits with the loop letters and not beside a.

Of those, twelve reach the topline (b, d, f, f, h, h, k, k, l, l, t, t) and eight drop below the baseline (f, f, g, j, p, q, y, z), which is why the grade 2 sheets rule all four lines rather than just the middle two. The whole lowercase alphabet is published.

Two letter connections are covered at grade 2: sh and th, which sit at positions 1 and 2 of the 30 joins this site teaches. A connection sheet is not a letter sheet with two letters on it — neither letter is new by then, and the exercise is the join itself, specifically not lifting the pencil across it.

What a grade 2 student actually copies

The grade 2 sheets put 167 distinct words and letter groups in front of a student, averaging 4.7 letters each. That average is the number to check before printing a set: a handwriting sheet that makes a child decode the word before writing it is testing two things and reporting one.

Seven exercise types appear at grade 2 — pair tracing, letter in words, letter repetition, letter tracing, letter connection, mixed and word tracing, across back to school and sight words themes. Within a sheet the order is always the same and the support comes away one step at a time: a model to look at, a traced line where the shape is already there, a copied line where it is not, and often a blank one at the end.

Before and after grade 2

Grade 2 is one of six grades this site publishes for, and cursive is unusual in how much a sheet moves between them: 36 of the sheets on this page were written for another grade. If grade 2 lands badly, the grade 1 page and the grade 3 page are usually the adjustment rather than a different skill — the hand is the limit, not the reading. Doing the next sheet the same day is usually wrong; the hand needs the gap more than the head does.