Cursive Sentence Copying: Daily Journal for Grade 3
Grade 3 students copy 4 journal sentences in cursive, then write their own. 26 words on one printable page. US Letter or A4. No sign-up.
About this worksheet
The 4 daily journal sentences on this grade 3 sheet were written for it, starting with "I brush my teeth each morning." The sheet has 5 blocks and 6 guided lines, and the practice text comes to 26 words. Between them the sentences on this grade 3 Daily Journal sheet 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, y).
Cursive Sentence Copying: Daily Journal for Grade 3
Copy each sentence in your best cursive. Keep the slant even and leave a finger space between words.
Copy the first sentence once: "I brush my teeth each morning."
Copy sentence 2 once, in your best cursive.
Copy sentence 3 once, in your best cursive.
Copy sentence 4 once, in your best cursive.
Write one sentence about your day in cursive.
How to form these letters
- The lowercase letter r appears 7 times here, as in "brush". Undercurve to the midline, a tiny shoulder to the right, then a short downstroke and an undercurve exit.
- The lowercase letter o appears 6 times here, as in "morning". Undercurve to the midline, close the oval, and exit from the top of the letter with a short bridge stroke.
- The lowercase letter y appears 6 times here, as in "my". Overcurve to the midline, down, a second hump, then a stem below the baseline that loops back to the exit.
What the sheet asks the hand to do
Cursive Sentence Copying: Daily Journal for Grade 3 is five blocks and six 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 Sentence Copying: Daily Journal for Grade 3 are I, brush, my, teeth, each, morning, We, read, a, book, after, lunch, dog and likes, and nine more: twenty-three distinct words, averaging 3.6 letters, the longest "morning" at 7 against a grade 3 limit of 10. 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 sentence once: "I brush my teeth each morning."”, the last “Write one sentence about your day in cursive.”. That is what lets the sheet be handed to a student who is working alone.
The text on the page
The text on Cursive Sentence Copying: Daily Journal for Grade 3 runs to 26 words over four rows, averaging 3.4 letters each, with "morning" 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 Sentence Copying: Daily Journal for Grade 3 use twenty of the twenty-six lowercase letters — a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, k, l, m, n, o, r, s, t, u, 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 three drop below the baseline (f, g, y), so the descender space is in use too.
Where this one sits
Cursive Sentence Copying: Daily Journal for Grade 3 is one of seventeen Sentence Practice sheets here and one of fourteen written for grade 3. It is sentence copying work, and it suits grade 3 and grade 4.
The closest things to Cursive Sentence Copying: Daily Journal for Grade 3 are Cursive Sentence Copying: Fun Facts for Grade 4 (grade 4) and Cursive Sentence Copying: Fun Facts for Grade 5 (grade 5). 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 4 sentences run from 6 to 8 words. Read each one aloud before writing so the hand is not decoding and forming at the same time.
- Watch word spacing on the longest sentence, "My dog likes to run in the yard.": cramped spaces are the most common reason a neat sentence is hard to read.
- Ready to move on when the sentence "I brush my teeth each morning." is written unaided with an even slant and every letter inside each word joined.
Practice this next
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