Cursive Copywork: My Shadow — Grade 6
Grade 6 cursive copywork: 52 words from My Shadow by Robert Louis Stevenson (1885), a line per ruled row, then blank lines. Public domain text.
About this worksheet
This sheet copies 52 words from My Shadow by Robert Louis Stevenson (1885), beginning "I have a little shadow that…". "My Shadow" 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. My Shadow was first published in 1885 and is in the public domain. Between them the lines of "My Shadow" 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, j, p, y).
Source: My Shadow by Robert Louis Stevenson (1885). From A Child's Garden of Verses (1885), first stanza. Public domain.
Cursive Copywork: My Shadow — 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 "My Shadow" by Stevenson twice.
Copy line 2 twice.
Copy line 3 twice.
Copy the last line twice.
Write two more lines about the shadow in the poem's rhythm.
How to form these letters
- The lowercase letter o appears 9 times here, as in "shadow". Undercurve to the midline, close the oval, and exit from the top of the letter with a short bridge stroke.
- The lowercase letter s appears 8 times here, as in "shadow". 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 5 times here, as in "more". 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: My Shadow, 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: My Shadow are I, have, a, little, shadow, that, goes, in, and, out, with, me, what and can, and twenty-three more: 37 distinct words, averaging 3.3 letters, the longest "little" at 6 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 "My Shadow" by Stevenson twice.”, the last “Write two more lines about the shadow in the poem's rhythm.”. 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: My Shadow runs to 52 words over four rows, averaging 3.1 letters each, with "little" 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: My Shadow use twenty-three of the twenty-six lowercase letters — a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, t, u, v, w and y. 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, j, p, y), so the descender space is in use too.
Where this one sits
Cursive Copywork: My Shadow 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: My Shadow are Cursive Guided Writing: A Friendly Letter (grade 5) and Cursive Copywork: The New Colossus (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 52 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 Stevenson put them. Capitals and punctuation are quoted exactly from My Shadow.
- Ready to move on when the line "I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me," is copied with no pencil lift inside a word and the slant held from the first word to the last.
Practice this next
More from paragraph practice and grade 6.
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Cursive Copywork: The New Colossus — Grade 6
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Cursive Copywork: Paul Revere's Ride — Grade 6
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