Cursive Copywork: A Psalm of Life — Grade 6
Grade 6 cursive copywork: 24 words from A Psalm of Life by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1838), a line per ruled row, then blank lines. Public domain text.
About this worksheet
This sheet copies 24 words from A Psalm of Life by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1838), beginning "Lives of great men all remind…". "A Psalm of Life" 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. A Psalm of Life was first published in 1838 and is in the public domain. Between them the lines of "A Psalm of Life" use 20 of the 26 lowercase letters, 7 of them tall (b, d, f, h, k, l, t) and 3 that drop below the baseline (f, g, p).
Source: A Psalm of Life by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1838). First published in The Knickerbocker (1838); the seventh stanza. Public domain.
Cursive Copywork: A Psalm of Life — 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 "A Psalm of Life" by Longfellow twice.
Copy line 2 twice.
Copy line 3 twice.
Copy the last line twice.
Write one sentence about a person whose "footprints" you admire.
How to form these letters
- The lowercase letter s appears 8 times here, as in "Lives". 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 6 times here, as in "of". 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 5 times here, as in "great". 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
There are five blocks on Cursive Copywork: A Psalm of Life, 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: A Psalm of Life are Lives, of, great, men, all, remind, us, We, can, make, our, sublime, And and departing, and seven more: twenty-one distinct words, averaging 4.4 letters, the longest "Footprints" at 10 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 "A Psalm of Life" by Longfellow twice.”, the last “Write one sentence about a person whose "footprints" you admire.”. 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: A Psalm of Life runs to 24 words over four rows, averaging 4.2 letters each, with "Footprints" 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: A Psalm of Life use twenty 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 and v. 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 three drop below the baseline (f, g, p), so the descender space is in use too.
Where this one sits
Cursive Copywork: A Psalm of Life 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: A Psalm of Life are Cursive Copywork: The Fox and the Grapes (grade 5) and Cursive Copywork: The Hare and the Tortoise (grade 6). 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 24 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 A Psalm of Life.
- Ready to move on when the line "Lives of great men all remind us" 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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