Cursive Dictation Practice: Franklin Dictation for Grade 5
Grade 5 students copy 3 short quotations from Benjamin Franklin in cursive, then write from memory. 25 words on one printable page.
About this worksheet
The 3 sentences on this grade 5 sheet are quoted from Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richard's Almanack) and are in the public domain: none was first published later than 1758. The sheet has 5 blocks and 7 guided lines, and the practice text comes to 25 words. Between them the sentences on this grade 5 Franklin Dictation sheet use 21 of the 26 lowercase letters, 6 of them tall (b, d, f, h, l, t) and 4 that drop below the baseline (f, g, p, y).
Source: Poor Richard's Almanack by Benjamin Franklin (1758). Sayings from the 1740, 1738 and 1758 almanacks respectively. Public domain (published before 1929).
Cursive Dictation Practice: Franklin Dictation for Grade 5
Read each sentence aloud before you copy it. At the end, cover the sentences and write from memory.
Read the first sentence aloud, then copy it once: "An empty bag cannot stand upright."
Read sentence 2 aloud, then copy it once.
Read sentence 3 aloud, then copy it once.
Cover the sentences above and write the one beginning "An empty bag…" from memory.
Cover the sayings above and write two of them from memory.
How to form these letters
- The lowercase letter o appears 7 times here, as in "cannot". 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 5 times here, as in "stand". Undercurve to the midline, curve back down to the left, close against the stroke at the baseline and exit forward.
- The lowercase letter g appears 4 times here, as in "bag". Close the oval at the midline, drop a straight stem below the baseline, loop back left and rise to the baseline exit.
What the sheet asks the hand to do
Cursive Dictation Practice: Franklin Dictation for Grade 5 prints five blocks onto one side, with seven guided lines. Three of copying and two 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 Dictation Practice: Franklin Dictation for Grade 5 are An, empty, bag, cannot, stand, upright, Wish, not, so, much, to, live, long and as, and nine more: twenty-three distinct words, averaging 3.7 letters, the longest "upright" at 7 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 “Read the first sentence aloud, then copy it once: "An empty bag cannot stand upright."”, the last “Cover the sayings above and write two of them from memory.”. That is what lets the sheet be handed to a student who is working alone.
The text on the page
The text on Cursive Dictation Practice: Franklin Dictation for Grade 5 runs to 25 words over three rows, averaging 3.6 letters each, with "upright" 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 Dictation Practice: Franklin Dictation for Grade 5 use twenty-one of the twenty-six lowercase letters — a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, t, u, v, w and y. Six of them are tall letters (b, d, f, h, 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 Dictation Practice: Franklin Dictation for Grade 5 is one of seventeen Sentence Practice sheets here and one of twelve written for grade 5. It is dictation prep work, and it suits grade 5 and grade 6.
The closest things to Cursive Dictation Practice: Franklin Dictation for Grade 5 are Cursive Sentence Copying: Daily Journal for Grade 4 (grade 4) and Cursive Sentence Copying: Daily Journal 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 3 sentences run from 6 to 11 words. Read each one aloud before writing so the hand is not decoding and forming at the same time.
- These lines follow the wording of Poor Richard's Almanack as it is usually printed today; the punctuation is part of the copy, so a period dropped from "An empty bag cannot stand upright." is an error to point out.
- Ready to move on when the sentence "An empty bag cannot stand upright." is written from memory with an even slant and every letter inside each word joined.
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