Kindergarten handwriting paper
Solid headline, dotted midline, solid baseline and a descender space below — set to the 1⅛ inch ruling used in Pre-K and Kindergarten.
Opens with these settings already loaded. Change anything you like, then download as PDF, PNG or SVG.
What the three lines are for
The baseline is where letters sit. The midline — dotted, so it guides without dominating — marks the top of lowercase letters like a, c and e. The headline is the top of tall letters like b, d and l. The gap below the baseline is the descender space, for the tails of g, j, p, q and y. Children who are taught these four positions by name form letters far more consistently than those given plain lined paper.
Why the ruling is this large
Five-year-olds are still developing the fine motor control to write small. The standard Pre-K and Kindergarten ruling is 1⅛ inches from headline to baseline, roughly three times an adult writing size. Grade 1 drops to ⅝ inch, Grade 2 to ½ inch, and Grade 3 to ⅜ inch. Use the preset buttons in the generator to switch between them.
Adjusting the descender space
The default skip space is half the ruling, which follows standard classroom paper. If a child is running their descenders into the next line, open the skip up — the generator lets you push it to twice the ruling. More white space between lines is one of the cheapest interventions for messy handwriting.
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.