Cursive Sentence Copying: Daily Journal for Grade 4
Grade 4 students copy 4 journal sentences in cursive, then write their own. 32 words on one printable page. US Letter or A4. No sign-up.
About this worksheet
The 4 daily journal sentences on this grade 4 sheet were written for it, starting with "On Saturday we hiked to the top of the hill." The sheet has 5 blocks and 6 guided lines, and the practice text comes to 32 words. Between them the sentences on this grade 4 Daily Journal sheet use 21 of the 26 lowercase letters, 7 of them tall (b, d, f, h, k, l, t) and 4 that drop below the baseline (f, g, p, y).
Cursive Sentence Copying: Daily Journal for Grade 4
Copy each sentence in your best cursive. Keep the slant even and leave a finger space between words.
Copy the first sentence once: "On Saturday we hiked to the top of the hill."
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 two sentences about something you did this week.
How to form these letters
- The lowercase letter o appears 13 times here, as in "to". 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 12 times here, as in "Saturday". 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 "finished". 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
There are five blocks on Cursive Sentence Copying: Daily Journal for Grade 4, six 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 Sentence Copying: Daily Journal for Grade 4 are On, Saturday, we, hiked, to, the, top, of, hill, I, finished, my, book and report, and fourteen more: 28 distinct words, averaging 4.8 letters, the longest "Saturday" at 8 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 sentence once: "On Saturday we hiked to the top of the hill."”, the last “Write two sentences about something you did this week.”. 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 4 runs to 32 words over four rows, averaging 4.5 letters each, with "Saturday" 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 4 use twenty-one of the twenty-six lowercase letters — a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, k, l, m, n, o, p, 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 four drop below the baseline (f, g, p, y), so the descender space is in use too.
Where this one sits
Cursive Sentence Copying: Daily Journal for Grade 4 is one of seventeen Sentence Practice sheets here and one of fourteen written for grade 4. It is sentence copying work, and it suits grade 4 and grade 5.
The closest things to Cursive Sentence Copying: Daily Journal for Grade 4 are Cursive Sentence Copying: Speed Practice for Grade 6 (grade 6) and Cursive Dictation Practice: Franklin Dictation 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 7 to 10 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, "On Saturday we hiked to the top of the hill.": cramped spaces are the most common reason a neat sentence is hard to read.
- Ready to move on when the sentence "On Saturday we hiked to the top of the hill." is written unaided with an even slant and every letter inside each word joined.
Practice this next
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Cursive Sentence Copying: Daily Journal for Grade 3
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Cursive Sentence Copying: Daily Journal for Grade 5
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