Cursive School Words Worksheet — Grade 3
Nine school words for grade 3 in cursive: pencil, paper, ruler, desk, teacher, class, recess, lunch and book. Traced and copied. Free printable PDF.
About this worksheet
This grade 3 word sheet puts 9 school words in front of the student, pencil, paper, ruler, desk, teacher, class, recess, lunch and book, across 6 blocks and 9 guided lines. The first two groups, starting with pencil, are traced and then copied, so the model is still on the page when the student writes unaided; the last group (recess, lunch and book) is traced only. Between them the grade 3 school words use 16 of the 26 lowercase letters, 6 of them tall (b, d, h, k, l, t) and 1 that drops below the baseline (p).
Cursive School Words Worksheet — Grade 3
Trace each word along the pale letters, then write the words again on the blank lines. Keep all the letters in a word connected.
Trace each school word, following the pale letters.
Copy pencil, paper and ruler on the lines below.
Trace the next group, keeping every letter joined.
Copy desk, teacher and class on the lines below.
Trace the last group of school words.
Write three more school words in cursive.
How to form these letters
- The lowercase letter r appears 5 times here, as in "paper". Undercurve to the midline, a tiny shoulder to the right, then a short downstroke and an undercurve exit.
- The lowercase letter s appears 5 times here, as in "desk". Undercurve to the midline, curve back down to the left, close against the stroke at the baseline and exit forward.
- The lowercase letter p appears 3 times here, as in "pencil". Undercurve to the midline, stem straight down below the baseline, retrace up and round a closed bowl at the midline.
What the sheet asks the hand to do
Cursive School Words Worksheet is six blocks and nine guided lines. Three of tracing, two of copying and one of free writing. The order is a traced row where the shape is already there, a copied row where it is not and a blank block with nothing printed at all, so the support comes away one step at a time rather than all at once.
The words on Cursive School Words Worksheet are pencil, paper, ruler, desk, teacher, class, recess, lunch and book: nine distinct words, averaging 5.2 letters, the longest "teacher" at 7 against a grade 3 limit of 10. Word length is the number to check before printing: a handwriting sheet that makes a student decode a word first is testing two things and reporting one.
Each block carries its own instruction rather than one set of directions at the top — the first reads “Trace each school word, following the pale letters.”, the last “Write three more school words in cursive.”. That is what lets the sheet be handed to a student who is working alone.
The text on the page
The text on Cursive School Words Worksheet runs to 9 words, averaging 5.2 letters each, with "teacher" the longest of them. That is the number that decides whether a sheet is a warm-up or a session: at this stage a child's hand tires before their attention does, and a page of long words tires it faster than a page of many short ones.
Between them the rows on Cursive School Words Worksheet use sixteen of the twenty-six lowercase letters — a, b, c, d, e, h, i, k, l, n, o, p, r, s, t and u. Six of them are tall letters (b, d, h, k, l, t), which is what makes the ruled height on this sheet matter, and one drops below the baseline (p), so the descender space is in use too.
Where this one sits
Cursive School Words Worksheet is one of nine Word Practice sheets here and one of fourteen written for grade 3. It is word tracing work, and it suits grade 3 and grade 4.
The closest things to Cursive School Words Worksheet are Cursive Animal Words Worksheet (grade 2) and Cursive Color Words Worksheet (grade 2). Cursive is one of the few subjects where doing the next sheet the same day is usually wrong — the hand needs the gap more than the head does — so those are the ones for tomorrow rather than for the rest of this session.
Notes for the grown-up
- The nine words here (pencil, paper, ruler, desk, teacher, class, recess, lunch and book) average 5.2 letters. Watch that the pencil lifts only between words, never inside one.
- Word spacing is the thing to check on a word sheet: one fingertip between pencil and paper, and the same gap all the way along the row.
- Ready to move on when all nine school words are written with every letter joined and the baseline held from pencil to book.
Practice this next
More from word practice and grade 3.
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