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.
About this worksheet
This grade 5 guided-writing sheet copies a 32-word model called "A Thank-You Note", written for this site, across 5 ruled lines, then leaves 4 blank lines for the student's own writing, 9 guided lines in all. Between them the lines of "A Thank-You Note" use 20 of the 26 lowercase letters, 6 of them tall (b, d, f, h, k, t) and 4 that drop below the baseline (f, g, p, y).
Source: A Thank-You Note by Cursive Sheets (2026). An original passage written for this site; not a quotation.
Cursive Guided Writing: A Thank-You Note — Grade 5
Copy the model line by line in your best cursive. Then use the blank lines to write your own, following the same shape.
Copy the opening line of "A Thank-You Note".
Copy line 2.
Copy line 3.
Copy line 4.
Copy the last line.
Write your own thank-you note to someone who gave you a gift: greeting, two sentences, closing.
How to form these letters
- The lowercase letter o appears 10 times here, as in "Rosa". 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 9 times here, as in "Dear". Undercurve to the midline, a tiny shoulder to the right, then a short downstroke and an undercurve exit.
- The lowercase letter s appears 9 times here, as in "Rosa". Undercurve to the midline, curve back down to the left, close against the stroke at the baseline and exit forward.
What the sheet asks the hand to do
Cursive Guided Writing: A Thank-You Note is six blocks and nine guided lines. Five 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 Guided Writing: A Thank-You Note are Dear, Aunt, Rosa, Thank, you, for, the, book, sent, my, birthday, I, read and first, and twelve more: twenty-six distinct words, averaging 4.2 letters, the longest "birthday" at 8 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 opening line of "A Thank-You Note".”, the last “Write your own thank-you note to someone who gave you a gift: greeting, two sentences, closing.”. That is what lets the sheet be handed to a student who is working alone.
The text on the page
The text on Cursive Guided Writing: A Thank-You Note runs to 32 words over five rows, averaging 3.9 letters each, with "birthday" 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 Guided Writing: A Thank-You Note use twenty of the twenty-six lowercase letters — a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, k, m, n, o, p, r, s, t, u, v and y. Six of them are tall letters (b, d, f, h, k, 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 Guided Writing: A Thank-You Note is one of twenty-one Paragraph Practice sheets here and one of twelve written for grade 5. It is guided writing work, and it suits grade 5 and grade 6.
The closest things to Cursive Guided Writing: A Thank-You Note are Cursive Copywork: The Swing (grade 5) and Cursive Paragraph Practice: Story Passage (grade 4). 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
- The model is 32 words in 5 ruled lines. Have the student read it aloud before copying so the hand is not decoding and forming letters at once.
- The freewrite asks for the same shape as the model (5 parts): check that the student's version has each part before checking the handwriting.
- Ready to move on when the line "Dear Aunt Rosa," is copied with an even slant and the 4 blank lines are used for the student's own writing.
Practice this next
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Cursive Copywork: The Swing — Grade 5
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