Cursive Copywork: The New Colossus — Grade 6
Grade 6 cursive copywork: 35 words from The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus (1883), a line per ruled row, then blank lines. Public domain text, free printable PDF.
About this worksheet
This sheet copies 35 words from The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus (1883), beginning "Give me your tired, your poor,…". "The New Colossus" 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 New Colossus was first published in 1883 and is in the public domain. Between them the lines of "The New Colossus" use 21 of the 26 lowercase letters, 6 of them tall (b, d, f, h, l, t) and 4 that drop below the baseline (f, g, p, y).
Source: The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus (1883). Sonnet written in 1883 for the Statue of Liberty pedestal; final five lines. Public domain.
Cursive Copywork: The New Colossus — 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 New Colossus" by Lazarus.
Copy line 2.
Copy line 3.
Copy line 4.
Copy the last line.
Write one sentence about where these lines can be read today.
How to form these letters
- The lowercase letter o appears 15 times here, as in "your". 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 13 times here, as in "your". Undercurve to the midline, a tiny shoulder to the right, then a short downstroke and an undercurve exit.
- The lowercase letter s appears 11 times here, as in "masses". Undercurve to the midline, curve back down to the left, close against the stroke at the baseline and exit forward.
What the sheet asks the hand to do
Cursive Copywork: The New Colossus prints six blocks onto one side, with 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 New Colossus are Give, me, your, tired, poor, huddled, masses, yearning, to, breathe, free, The, wretched and refuse, and fourteen more: 28 distinct words, averaging 5.0 letters, the longest "tempest-tost" 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 New Colossus" by Lazarus.”, the last “Write one sentence about where these lines can be read today.”. 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 New Colossus runs to 35 words over five rows, averaging 4.6 letters each, with "tempest-tost" 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 New Colossus use twenty-one of the twenty-six lowercase letters — a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, t, u, v, w and y. Six of them are tall letters (b, d, f, h, 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 New Colossus 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 New Colossus are Cursive Copywork: Gettysburg Address, unfinished work (grade 6) and Cursive Copywork: The Arrow and the Song (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 35 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.
- Each ruled line is a line of the poem, so the line breaks are part of the copy; keep them where Lazarus put them. Capitals and punctuation are quoted exactly from The New Colossus.
- Ready to move on when the line "Give me your tired, your poor," 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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