Scripture Copywork

Free printable copywork sheets: twelve verses, one for each month, ruled for a child to write on. Two rulings, so the same verse suits a hand still building letters or one that has stopped thinking about it. Two editions, Protestant and Catholic, because the psalms are numbered differently and that matters to the family using them.

What you get

• Four bound sets of twelve sheets: Protestant wide rule, Protestant narrow rule, Catholic wide rule, Catholic narrow rule.
• The same twelve verses again as single sheets, numbered by month in the Protestant folder and by season in the Catholic one, so you can pull one sheet the morning you want it.
• Fifty-three files in all. US Letter, PDF, print at 100 percent so the ruling comes out at the height it was drawn.

Which ruling

The wide rule gives half an inch of writing space, a dashed midline for the height of a small letter, and a quarter inch under each line so a g or a y has somewhere to go. Most children want this one through about second grade. The narrow rule is a third of an inch and fits more words on the page. Some families run both for a while, wide on Monday and narrow on Thursday, then let the child pick.

The text

Public domain only. The Protestant edition is the King James, running September through August. The Catholic edition is the Douay-Rheims, Challoner revision, following the church year and using Douay psalm numbering, which runs one behind the King James for most psalms. Psalm 126 in the Douay is Psalm 127 in the King James. That is not an error, and each sheet names its translation so nobody has to work it out in April.

What we print, we print as the translation sets it, punctuation and all. Anything left out is marked with three dots. A colon at the end of a line is the colon that is in the Bible. The June sheet opens on a small letter for the same reason: Joshua 24:15 reads "but as for me and my house", and we would rather show that than tidy it into something the verse does not say.

The capitals

Every capital is a real engraving. Jeremias Falck cut an ornamental alphabet around 1645 to 1650, and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam holds the sheets, all public domain. Each letter is cut from its plate and set at the head of the verse, with its object number printed at the foot.

Falck worked a 24 letter alphabet. No J and no U, because Latin capitals in 1645 still used I for both I and J, and V for both U and V. The Catholic July sheet opens on "Unless", so it carries the V. That is the period letterform, and the sheet says so rather than leaving you to wonder.

Straight answers

Why give this away? Copying a verse onto ruled lines is not hard to make. Course descriptions in the register an admissions office reads are hard. Fifty-one statutes reread every year are hard. Charging for the easy one would only make the other two look less serious.

May I copy it for a co-op? Print and copy freely for one home or one classroom. Do not resell the files or the sheets.