Cursive Worksheets for Grade 4

What is on this page

One of the four sheets on this page was written for grade 4 specifically, and three 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 4, largest first, are Themed Worksheets (1), Paragraph Practice (1), Sentence Practice (1) and Word Practice (1).

Across those sheets a grade 4 student works through 24 exercise blocks and 35 ruled lines: 13 copying rows, 7 tracing rows and 4 free-writing rows with nothing printed. 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.

What a grade 4 student actually copies

The grade 4 sheets put 75 distinct words and letter groups in front of a student, averaging 4.4 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.

Four exercise types appear at grade 4 — mixed, paragraph copying, sentence tracing and word tracing, across back to school, stories, pangrams 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 4

Grade 4 is one of six grades this site publishes for, and cursive is unusual in how much a sheet moves between them: three of the sheets on this page were written for another grade. If grade 4 lands badly, the grade 3 page and the grade 5 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.