Cursive Sentence Copying: Emerson Quotations for Grade 5
Grade 5 students copy 4 short quotations from Ralph Waldo Emerson in cursive, then copy one again. 33 words on one printable page.
About this worksheet
The 4 sentences on this grade 5 sheet are quoted from Ralph Waldo Emerson (Essays: First Series and Letters and Social Aims) and are in the public domain: none was first published later than 1876. The sheet has 5 blocks and 6 guided lines, and the practice text comes to 33 words. Between them the sentences on this grade 5 Emerson Quotations sheet use 20 of the 26 lowercase letters, 6 of them tall (b, d, f, h, l, t) and 3 that drop below the baseline (f, g, y).
Source: Essays: First Series and Letters and Social Aims by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1876). "Friendship", "Circles" and "Self-Reliance" (Essays: First Series, 1841); "Every artist was first an amateur" from "Progress of Culture" (1867, collected 1876). Public domain.
Cursive Sentence Copying: Emerson Quotations for Grade 5
Copy each sentence in your best cursive. Keep the slant even and leave a finger space between words.
Copy the first sentence once: "The only way to have a friend is to be one."
Copy sentence 2 once, in your best cursive.
Copy sentence 3 once, in your best cursive.
Copy sentence 4 once, in your best cursive.
Copy the quotation you agree with most, then add one sentence saying why.
How to form these letters
- The lowercase letter r appears 13 times here, as in "friend". Undercurve to the midline, a tiny shoulder to the right, then a short downstroke and an undercurve exit.
- The lowercase letter s appears 11 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 8 times here, as in "only". 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
There are five blocks on Cursive Sentence Copying: Emerson Quotations for Grade 5, 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: Emerson Quotations for Grade 5 are The, only, way, to, have, a, friend, is, be, one, Nothing, great, was and ever, and fifteen more: 29 distinct words, averaging 4.8 letters, the longest "enthusiasm" at 10 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 first sentence once: "The only way to have a friend is to be one."”, the last “Copy the quotation you agree with most, then add one sentence saying why.”. 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: Emerson Quotations for Grade 5 runs to 33 words over four rows, averaging 4.5 letters each, with "enthusiasm" 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: Emerson Quotations for Grade 5 use twenty of the twenty-six lowercase letters — a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, l, m, n, o, 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 three drop below the baseline (f, g, y), so the descender space is in use too.
Where this one sits
Cursive Sentence Copying: Emerson Quotations for Grade 5 is one of seventeen Sentence Practice sheets here and one of twelve written for grade 5. It is sentence copying work, and it suits grade 5 and grade 6.
The closest things to Cursive Sentence Copying: Emerson Quotations for Grade 5 are Cursive Sentence Copying: Franklin Sayings for Grade 4 (grade 4) and Cursive Sentence Copying: Emerson, Franklin and Longfellow for Grade 6 (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
- The 4 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 Essays: First Series and Letters and Social Aims as it is usually printed today; the punctuation is part of the copy, so a period dropped from "The only way to have a friend is to be one." is an error to point out.
- Ready to move on when the sentence "The only way to have a friend is to be one." is written unaided with an even slant and every letter inside each word joined.
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