Cursive Copywork: The Fox and the Grapes — Grade 5
Grade 5 cursive copywork: 56 words from The Fox and the Grapes by Aesop (1867), a line per ruled row, then blank lines. Public domain text, free printable PDF.
About this worksheet
This sheet copies 56 words from The Fox and the Grapes by Aesop, translated by George Fyler Townsend (1867), beginning "A famished Fox saw some clusters…". "The Fox and the Grapes" is split into 6 ruled lines, each copied once, followed by 2 blank lines for the student's own writing, 8 guided lines in all. The Fox and the Grapes was first published in 1867 and is in the public domain. Between them the lines of "The Fox and the Grapes" use 23 of the 26 lowercase letters, 7 of them tall (b, d, f, h, k, l, t) and 4 that drop below the baseline (f, g, p, y).
Source: The Fox and the Grapes by Aesop, translated by George Fyler Townsend (1867). Aesop's Fables, Townsend translation (1867), complete fable. The opening words are set in small capitals in the printed edition and are given here in ordinary case. Public domain.
Cursive Copywork: The Fox and the Grapes — Grade 5
Read the whole passage aloud once. Then copy each line in your best cursive, matching the capitals and punctuation exactly. Use the last lines for your own writing.
Copy the first line of "The Fox and the Grapes" by Aesop.
Copy line 2.
Copy line 3.
Copy line 4.
Copy line 5.
Copy the last line.
Write one sentence saying what the Fox should have done instead.
How to form these letters
- The lowercase letter r appears 19 times here, as in "clusters". Undercurve to the midline, a tiny shoulder to the right, then a short downstroke and an undercurve exit.
- The lowercase letter s appears 18 times here, as in "famished". Undercurve to the midline, curve back down to the left, close against the stroke at the baseline and exit forward.
- The lowercase letter o appears 14 times here, as in "Fox". Undercurve to the midline, close the oval, and exit from the top of the letter with a short bridge stroke.
What the sheet asks the hand to do
Cursive Copywork: The Fox and the Grapes prints seven blocks onto one side, with eight guided lines. Six of copying and one of free writing. The order is a copied row written from a printed model and a blank block with nothing printed at all: nothing on this sheet is traced, so the student writes from a printed model from the first row.
The words on Cursive Copywork: The Fox and the Grapes are A, famished, Fox, saw, some, clusters, of, ripe, black, grapes, hanging, from, trellised and vine, and 31 more: 45 distinct words, averaging 4.5 letters, the longest "disappointment" at 14 against a grade 5 limit of 14. Word length is the number to check before printing: a handwriting sheet that makes a student decode a word first is testing two things and reporting one.
Each block carries its own instruction rather than one set of directions at the top — the first reads “Copy the first line of "The Fox and the Grapes" by Aesop.”, the last “Write one sentence saying what the Fox should have done instead.”. That is what lets the sheet be handed to a student who is working alone.
The text on the page
The text on Cursive Copywork: The Fox and the Grapes runs to 56 words over six rows, averaging 4.3 letters each, with "disappointment" the longest of them. That is the number that decides whether a sheet is a warm-up or a session: at this stage a child's hand tires before their attention does, and a page of long words tires it faster than a page of many short ones.
Between them the rows on Cursive Copywork: The Fox and the Grapes use twenty-three of the twenty-six lowercase letters — a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, k, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, t, u, v, w, x and y. Seven of them are tall letters (b, d, f, h, k, l, t), which is what makes the ruled height on this sheet matter, and four drop below the baseline (f, g, p, y), so the descender space is in use too.
Where this one sits
Cursive Copywork: The Fox and the Grapes is one of twenty-one Paragraph Practice sheets here and one of twelve written for grade 5. It is paragraph copying work, and it suits grade 5 and grade 6.
The closest things to Cursive Copywork: The Fox and the Grapes are Cursive Copywork: A Psalm of Life (grade 6) and Cursive Copywork: The Village Blacksmith (grade 5). Cursive is one of the few subjects where doing the next sheet the same day is usually wrong — the hand needs the gap more than the head does — so those are the ones for tomorrow rather than for the rest of this session.
Notes for the grown-up
- This passage is 56 words in 6 ruled lines. Have the student read it aloud first so the hand is not decoding and forming letters at the same time.
- The line breaks were made at clause boundaries so each row is a complete thought; a student who stops mid-row has lost the sense as well as the stroke. Capitals and punctuation are quoted exactly from The Fox and the Grapes.
- Ready to move on when the line "A famished Fox saw some clusters of ripe" is copied with no pencil lift inside a word and the slant held from the first word to the last.
Practice this next
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