Cursive Copywork: The Hare and the Tortoise — Grade 6
Grade 6 cursive copywork: 42 words from The Hare and the Tortoise by Aesop (1867), a line per ruled row, then blank lines. Public domain text.
About this worksheet
This sheet copies 42 words from The Hare and the Tortoise by Aesop, translated by George Fyler Townsend (1867), beginning "The Hare, lying down by the…". "The Hare and the Tortoise" is split into 5 ruled lines, each copied once, followed by 2 blank lines for the student's own writing, 7 guided lines in all. The Hare and the Tortoise was first published in 1867 and is in the public domain. Between them the lines of "The Hare and the Tortoise" use 23 of the 26 lowercase letters, 7 of them tall (b, d, f, h, k, l, t) and 5 that drop below the baseline (f, g, p, y, z).
Source: The Hare and the Tortoise by Aesop, translated by George Fyler Townsend (1867). Aesop's Fables, Townsend translation (1867); the closing three sentences of the fable, including its moral. Public domain.
Cursive Copywork: The Hare and the Tortoise — Grade 6
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 Hare and the Tortoise" by Aesop.
Copy line 2.
Copy line 3.
Copy line 4.
Copy the last line.
Write one sentence about a time slow and steady worked for you.
How to form these letters
- The lowercase letter s appears 12 times here, as in "wayside". 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 10 times here, as in "down". Undercurve to the midline, close the oval, and exit from the top of the letter with a short bridge stroke.
- The lowercase letter r appears 7 times here, as in "Hare". Undercurve to the midline, a tiny shoulder to the right, then a short downstroke and an undercurve exit.
What the sheet asks the hand to do
Cursive Copywork: The Hare and the Tortoise is six blocks and seven guided lines. Five 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 Hare and the Tortoise are The, Hare, lying, down, by, wayside, fell, fast, asleep, At, last, waking, up and and, and twenty more: 34 distinct words, averaging 4.5 letters, the longest "comfortably" at 11 against a grade 6 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 Hare and the Tortoise" by Aesop.”, the last “Write one sentence about a time slow and steady worked for you.”. 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 Hare and the Tortoise runs to 42 words over five rows, averaging 4.2 letters each, with "comfortably" 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 Hare and the Tortoise 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, y and z. 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 five drop below the baseline (f, g, p, y, z), so the descender space is in use too.
Where this one sits
Cursive Copywork: The Hare and the Tortoise is one of twenty-one Paragraph Practice sheets here and one of twelve written for grade 6. It is paragraph copying work, and it suits grade 6.
The closest things to Cursive Copywork: The Hare and the Tortoise are Cursive Copywork: The Declaration of Independence (grade 6) and Cursive Paragraph Practice: Declaring Independence (grade 4). 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 42 words in 5 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 Hare and the Tortoise.
- Ready to move on when the line "The Hare, lying down by the wayside, fell fast asleep." 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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