Canadian-Style Cursive & Print Worksheets

How to make it

1. Type English or FrenchEnter words or sentences, one per line. Accented French letters such as é, è, ç and ô print in the cursive font and in the print styles.
2. Choose style and sizeKeep Canada: cursive, or switch to Print, ball-and-stick for arrows. Then set letter height, traced rows and empty rows.
3. Print at full sizeCheck that the paper is set to US Letter, print at 100 percent, or download a PDF to send home.

Is there such a thing as Canadian cursive?

Yes and no. Education in Canada is run by the provinces and territories, so there is no single national handwriting model, and practice varies from one board, and even one school, to the next. Still, many Canadians share a common picture of cursive. For much of the twentieth century, a large number of Canadian schools taught penmanship from the MacLean Method of writing, a Canadian course that emphasized a smooth, slanted, continuous hand and plenty of drill. Grandparents who learned in that era often write a very similar script.

Today, most Canadian children learn print first, often an upright ball-and-stick print, and many schools introduce cursive around Grade 3, though some start earlier and some barely teach it. Interest in cursive has grown again in recent years: Ontario, for example, made cursive optional in 2006 and brought it back from Grade 3 in 2023. Ask your school what it uses before you print a large set.

The cursive font on these sheets

This page opens with Canada: cursive, which uses Playwrite CA, part of the Playwrite school font family by TypeTogether, free on Google Fonts under the SIL Open Font License. Its designers describe a slanted, continuous cursive shaped by traditional American school models, and their notes on Canada trace the cursive many Canadians learned back to MacLean's Method of Writing. Letters are joined throughout a word, with loops on tall letters and below the line, and the joins are made by the font as you type.

Traced copies appear as a dashed outline of each joined word. That outline has no arrows or start dots: a font records the outline of a letter, not the order or direction of the strokes, so the cursive rows cannot show movement. For cursive, many teachers demonstrate a letter group on the board, then hand out the sheet for repetition.

Print with arrows for kindergarten to Grade 2

Younger children usually need print, not cursive. In the Handwriting style menu, choose Print, ball-and-stick: upright letters drawn from our own stroke data, with a green dot where the pencil starts, pink arrows for direction and numbers for stroke order. That is close to the manuscript many Canadian primary classrooms teach. If your school uses a slanted print with small tails instead, choose the slanted print option, which has the same arrows.

For whole-alphabet practice in print, the letter tracing worksheets page makes one sheet or one page per letter, and for children's names the name tracing generator prints a page per child from a class list.

French words, accents and immersion classes

Canadian classrooms often write in two languages, so accents matter. The fonts on this site include the accented letters used in French: é, è, ê, ë, à, â, ç, î, ï, ô, ù, û and their capitals. Words such as école, fenêtre, garçon, forêt and Noël print in the cursive style with their accents in place, which makes the sheets usable for French immersion and core French practice. The two print styles draw these accents too, as the letter with its mark.

The ligature œ, as in sœur or cœur, is included too, so French words keep their proper spelling on the sheet. The print styles cannot draw œ and say so in a warning, so keep words with it on a cursive line. If a class has not met the ligature yet, it is worth pointing it out in the dark example row before the tracing starts.

A useful exercise in immersion classes is to print the same short sentence in both languages, one line each, so children practice the joins they share and notice where accents sit above the letter body. Another sloped, fully joined style worth comparing is the Irish style in the same menu.

A Grade 3 cursive plan

Many teachers introduce cursive lowercase in small groups that share an opening stroke, rather than from a to z. One sequence teachers often use: first the short letters that swing up from the line, like e, i and u; next the round family that begins at the top with a backward curve, like c, a, o and d; after that the tall loopers, b, h, k and l; then the hump letters m, n, v and x; and capitals at the very end. Type one group per line, with spaces, at 5/8 inch, and then a line of short words that use only that group.

Give each group a few days. Start with a dark model and three traced copies, then move to one traced copy and two empty rows. By the end of the year, many Grade 3 students can write a sentence at 1/2 inch. Keep a printed reference handy: the cursive alphabet chart prints all the pairs at once, and you can pick the Canadian style there too.

Cursive for reading, not only writing

One reason teachers give for keeping cursive is that children should be able to read it: notes from grandparents, older family documents, a teacher's handwritten comments, historical letters in a social studies unit. Children who have written a style themselves usually find it much easier to read.

A simple activity: print a short handwritten-style message at 5/8 inch with the dark model and a single traced row, and ask students to read it aloud before they copy it in the empty rows below. Later in the year, use the same idea with a line from a historical letter or a short poem. It turns a practice sheet into a reading task, which many Grade 4 and 5 students find more interesting than drills.

Adults relearning cursive

Plenty of Canadian adults learned cursive decades ago, stopped using it, and now want it back, to sign documents, write cards or read family letters. Start with the alphabet at 1/2 inch to remember the shapes, then work at 3/8 inch, which is close to everyday lined paper. Two traced rows and two empty rows per line is a comfortable ratio for adults. Practicing your own signature is a natural first sentence, followed by a short quotation or a shopping list.

The handwriting practice for adults page has adult-friendly defaults. For context on how Canadian styles relate to American, British and Australian ones, see handwriting styles by country.