The cursive on these worksheets
The letters are drawn in Playwrite US Trad, a free font (SIL Open Font License) by the type foundry TypeTogether, Veronika Burian and José Scaglione. Google Fonts describes it as following “the traditional American style of Zaner-Bloser and D’Nealian”, a slanted, continuous cursive in which ascenders and descenders have loops, with mirrored loops on p and q. It is not the official alphabet of either program, so if your class follows one, compare a few capitals with the wall chart before you print a set.
The page opens at Medium (¾ inch from the top line to the baseline), smaller than the Large size of the print name tracing generator because joined names run long, but big enough to see every join. Move down to Small or Extra small when the name is familiar.
How the letters join
The font joins the lowercase letters on its own, so the dotted path runs from one letter straight into the next. Capitals behave differently: E and L lead straight into the next letter, while O, H and N finish on their own and the next letter starts fresh. Look at the solid model row before tracing to see where the pencil lifts.
Extra space between letters is turned off for cursive, since spacing would break the joins. The dotted style shows the path to follow; switch to Gray once the joins are familiar, and keep one or two blank rows at the end for writing the name without help.
When cursive starts
Schools start cursive in different grades, and some states set rules for it: Education Week reported in November 2024 that 24 states had some kind of cursive requirement. The second grade writing paper and third grade writing paper pages cover the row sizes and state rules for those years, and give blank rows for practice once the name is familiar.
For a word list in joined letters, open the Dolch sight words page and switch Handwriting to Cursive.
What this page sets up
| Handwriting | Cursive |
|---|---|
| Letter case | Name (capital first letter) |
| Letter size | Medium: ¾ in / 19 mm (K, 1st) |
| Title | “Trace your name in cursive” |
Anything else starts from the choices you last made on the name tracing worksheet generator in this browser. Settings you change here are remembered for next time, but this page's own setup, the names and the title are not, so it always opens the same way.