Cursive Copywork: The Arrow and the Song — Grade 5
Grade 5 cursive copywork: 29 words from The Arrow and the Song by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1845), a line per ruled row, then blank lines. Public domain text.
About this worksheet
This sheet copies 29 words from The Arrow and the Song by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1845), beginning "I shot an arrow into the…". "The Arrow and the Song" is split into 4 ruled lines, each copied twice, followed by 2 blank lines for the student's own writing, 10 guided lines in all. The Arrow and the Song was first published in 1845 and is in the public domain. Between them the lines of "The Arrow and the Song" use 17 of the 26 lowercase letters, 6 of them tall (d, f, h, k, l, t) and 3 that drop below the baseline (f, g, y).
Source: The Arrow and the Song by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1845). From The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems (1845), first stanza. Public domain.
Cursive Copywork: The Arrow and the Song — 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 Arrow and the Song" by Longfellow twice.
Copy line 2 twice.
Copy line 3 twice.
Copy the last line twice.
Where do you think the arrow landed? Write two lines in cursive.
How to form these letters
- The lowercase letter o appears 11 times here, as in "shot". 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 6 times here, as in "arrow". Undercurve to the midline, a tiny shoulder to the right, then a short downstroke and an undercurve exit.
- The lowercase letter w appears 6 times here, as in "arrow". Undercurve to the midline, down, undercurve again, down, then a short bridge stroke that exits from the top.
What the sheet asks the hand to do
There are five blocks on Cursive Copywork: The Arrow and the Song, ten guided lines between them. Four 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 Arrow and the Song are I, shot, an, arrow, into, the, air, It, fell, to, earth, knew, not and where, and ten more: twenty-four distinct words, averaging 3.8 letters, the longest "swiftly" at 7 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 Arrow and the Song" by Longfellow twice.”, the last “Where do you think the arrow landed? Write two lines in cursive.”. 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 Arrow and the Song runs to 29 words over four rows, averaging 3.5 letters each, with "swiftly" 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 Arrow and the Song use seventeen of the twenty-six lowercase letters — a, d, e, f, g, h, i, k, l, n, o, r, s, t, u, w and y. Six of them are tall letters (d, f, h, k, l, t), which is what makes the ruled height on this sheet matter, and three drop below the baseline (f, g, y), so the descender space is in use too.
Where this one sits
Cursive Copywork: The Arrow and the Song 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 Arrow and the Song are Cursive Paragraph Practice: Story Passage (grade 4) and Cursive Guided Writing: A Thank-You Note (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 29 words in 4 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 Longfellow put them. Capitals and punctuation are quoted exactly from The Arrow and the Song.
- Ready to move on when the line "I shot an arrow into the air," 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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Cursive Copywork: The Swing — Grade 5
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Cursive Guided Writing: A Thank-You Note — Grade 5
Grade 5 students copy a 32-word model, "A Thank-You Note", in cursive, then write their own version. Free printable PDF on one page.