Cursive Copywork: Rain — Grade 4
Grade 4 cursive copywork: 24 words from Rain by Robert Louis Stevenson (1885), a line per ruled row, then blank lines. Public domain text, free printable PDF.
About this worksheet
This sheet copies 24 words from Rain by Robert Louis Stevenson (1885), beginning "The rain is raining all around,…". "Rain" 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. Rain was first published in 1885 and is in the public domain. Between them the lines of "Rain" use 17 of the 26 lowercase letters, 6 of them tall (b, d, f, h, l, t) and 3 that drop below the baseline (f, g, p).
Source: Rain by Robert Louis Stevenson (1885). From A Child's Garden of Verses (1885), complete poem. Public domain.
Cursive Copywork: Rain — Grade 4
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 "Rain" by Stevenson twice.
Copy line 2 twice.
Copy line 3 twice.
Copy the last line twice.
Write two lines of your own about the weather today.
How to form these letters
- The lowercase letter r appears 7 times here, as in "rain". Undercurve to the midline, a tiny shoulder to the right, then a short downstroke and an undercurve exit.
- The lowercase letter s appears 7 times here, as in "is". 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 4 times here, as in "around". Undercurve to the midline, close the oval, and exit from the top of the letter with a short bridge stroke.
What the sheet asks the hand to do
Cursive Copywork: Rain prints five blocks onto one side, with ten guided lines. 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: Rain are The, rain, is, raining, all, around, It, falls, on, field, and, tree, rains and umbrellas, and four more: eighteen distinct words, averaging 4.1 letters, the longest "umbrellas" at 9 against a grade 4 limit of 12. 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 "Rain" by Stevenson twice.”, the last “Write two lines of your own about the weather 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: Rain runs to 24 words over four rows, averaging 3.7 letters each, with "umbrellas" 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: Rain use seventeen of the twenty-six lowercase letters — a, b, d, e, f, g, h, i, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, t and u. Six of them are tall letters (b, d, f, h, 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: Rain is one of twenty-one Paragraph Practice sheets here and one of fourteen written for grade 4. It is paragraph copying work, and it suits grade 4 and grade 5.
The closest things to Cursive Copywork: Rain 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 Stevenson put them. Capitals and punctuation are quoted exactly from Rain.
- Ready to move on when the line "The rain is raining all around," 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 4.
Cursive Paragraph Practice: Declaring Independence — Grade 4
Grade 4 students copy a 33-word passage, "Declaring Independence", in cursive, then continue in their own words. Free printable PDF on one page.
Cursive Guided Writing: My Favorite Season — Grade 4
Grade 4 students copy a 32-word model, "My Favorite Season", in cursive, then write their own version. Free printable PDF on one page.
Cursive Paragraph Practice: Water on Earth — Grade 4
Grade 4 students copy a 38-word passage, "Water on Earth", in cursive, then continue in their own words. Free printable PDF on one page.
Cursive Paragraph Practice: Story Passage
Grade 4 students copy a five-sentence adventure story passage in cursive, then use the freewrite section to continue the tale in their own words.
Cursive Copywork: The Fox and the Grapes — Grade 5
Grade 5 cursive copywork: 56 words from The Fox and the Grapes by Aesop (1867), a line per ruled row, then blank lines. Public domain text, free printable PDF.
Cursive Guided Writing: A Friendly Letter — Grade 5
Grade 5 students copy a 37-word model, "A Friendly Letter", in cursive, then write their own version. Free printable PDF on one page.