NSW Foundation Font Name Tracing

The NSW Foundation Style

“In New South Wales public schools, students learn to use the NSW Foundation Style writing font,” says the NSW Department of Education’s parent guide, Handwriting in the early years. The worksheets on this page use Edu NSW ACT Foundation, a free font (SIL Open Font License) that Tina Anderson and Corey Anderson designed for that style. Its default letters are the style’s print, which Google Fonts describes as “a simple sloped print for early primary school”: single-storey a and g, and letters that lean slightly to the right, as the department’s handwriting sequence asks (“All letters should slope slightly to the right”).

The page opens on A4 paper with the first letter of each name as a capital. Paste a class list with one name per line to get a page for every child in one PDF.

Four lines, not three

The generator’s usual lines are the US layout: a solid top line, a dashed midline and a solid baseline. The department’s guide describes a different setup, and this page draws it:

• Tall letters stretch from the top dotted line to the bottom solid line. In the guide’s examples, t and the capitals S, A, T and P are tall letters.
• Short letters stay between the two solid lines and touch both, like a and s.
• Long letters stretch down to the bottom dotted line, like p.

The guide also suggests short mnemonics, quick enough to say in the time it takes to write the letter: “Around, up, down!” for a, “Down, across!” for t and “Down, up, around and back!” for p. Children can say them while tracing the letters of their name too. If you switch Guide lines to Gray or Red and blue you get the US three-line layout; the NSW lines are offered only on this page.

What comes next

In the department’s suggested handwriting sequence for Years 3 and 4, Year 3 adds exit hooks to the print letters: a short, curved upward exit stroke at the baseline on letters such as a, d, h, i, k, l, m, n, t and u, which later become the joins of NSW Foundation Style cursive. These worksheets keep to the print letters without hooks.

The same generator makes print name tracing sheets in a US-style manuscript and cursive name tracing sheets. For writing practice beyond names, print lined handwriting paper in A4.

What this page sets up

Handwriting	Slanted print (NSW/ACT Foundation)
Letter case	Name (capital first letter)
Guide lines	NSW lines (dotted top and tail lines)
Descender line	On
Paper	A4

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.