Cursive Copywork: The Village Blacksmith — Grade 5
Grade 5 cursive copywork: 32 words from The Village Blacksmith by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1840), a line per ruled row, then blank lines. Public domain text.
About this worksheet
This sheet copies 32 words from The Village Blacksmith by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1840), beginning "Under a spreading chestnut-tree The village…". "The Village Blacksmith" 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 Village Blacksmith was first published in 1840 and is in the public domain. Between them the lines of "The Village Blacksmith" 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 Village Blacksmith by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1840). First published in The Knickerbocker (1840); first stanza. Public domain.
Cursive Copywork: The Village Blacksmith — 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 Village Blacksmith" by Longfellow.
Copy line 2.
Copy line 3.
Copy line 4.
Copy line 5.
Copy the last line.
Describe a worker you have watched, in two sentences.
How to form these letters
- The lowercase letter s appears 16 times here, as in "spreading". Undercurve to the midline, curve back down to the left, close against the stroke at the baseline and exit forward.
- The lowercase letter r appears 9 times here, as in "Under". Undercurve to the midline, a tiny shoulder to the right, then a short downstroke and an undercurve exit.
- The lowercase letter g appears 5 times here, as in "spreading". Close the oval at the midline, drop a straight stem below the baseline, loop back left and rise to the baseline exit.
What the sheet asks the hand to do
Cursive Copywork: The Village Blacksmith is seven blocks and 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 Village Blacksmith are Under, a, spreading, chestnut-tree, The, village, smithy, stands, smith, mighty, man, is, he and With, and fourteen more: 28 distinct words, averaging 4.7 letters, the longest "chestnut-tree" at 12 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 Village Blacksmith" by Longfellow.”, the last “Describe a worker you have watched, in two sentences.”. 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 Village Blacksmith runs to 32 words over six rows, averaging 4.4 letters each, with "chestnut-tree" 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 Village Blacksmith 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 Village Blacksmith 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 Village Blacksmith 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 32 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.
- 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 Village Blacksmith.
- Ready to move on when the line "Under a spreading chestnut-tree" 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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