Cursive Sentence Copying: Pangrams for Grade 4
Grade 4 students copy 4 pangram sentences in cursive, then copy one again. 29 words on one printable page. US Letter or A4. No sign-up.
About this worksheet
Every one of the 4 sentences on this sheet is a pangram: it uses all 26 letters of the alphabet, which is why pangrams make good cursive practice. The sheet has 5 blocks and 6 guided lines, and the practice text comes to 29 words. Between them the sentences on this grade 4 Pangrams sheet use 26 of the 26 lowercase letters, 7 of them tall (b, d, f, h, k, l, t) and 7 that drop below the baseline (f, g, j, p, q, y, z).
Cursive Sentence Copying: Pangrams 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: "Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz."
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 shortest pangram again as fast as you can while staying neat.
How to form these letters
- The lowercase letter o appears 7 times here, as in "love". 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 7 times here, as in "Jackdaws". Undercurve to the midline, curve back down to the left, close against the stroke at the baseline and exit forward.
- The lowercase letter r appears 5 times here, as in "quartz". Undercurve to the midline, a tiny shoulder to the right, then a short downstroke and an undercurve exit.
What the sheet asks the hand to do
Cursive Sentence Copying: Pangrams for Grade 4 prints five blocks onto one side, with 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: Pangrams for Grade 4 are Jackdaws, love, my, big, sphinx, of, quartz, How, vexingly, quick, daft, zebras, jump and zephyrs, and twelve more: twenty-six distinct words, averaging 4.7 letters, the longest "Jackdaws" 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: "Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz."”, the last “Copy the shortest pangram again as fast as you can while staying neat.”. 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: Pangrams for Grade 4 runs to 29 words over four rows, averaging 4.6 letters each, with "Jackdaws" 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: Pangrams for Grade 4 use twenty-six of the twenty-six lowercase letters, so every lowercase letterform gets a turn. 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 seven drop below the baseline (f, g, j, p, q, y, z), so the descender space is in use too.
Where this one sits
Cursive Sentence Copying: Pangrams 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: Pangrams for Grade 4 are Cursive Sentence Copying: Emerson Quotations for Grade 5 (grade 5) 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 10 words. Each one uses all 26 letters, so every letterform gets a turn on this sheet; pangram vocabulary (Jackdaws, sphinx) sits above grade 4 reading level by nature, so read each sentence aloud with the student before copying.
- Watch word spacing on the longest sentence, "My girl wove six dozen plaid jackets before she quit.": cramped spaces are the most common reason a neat sentence is hard to read.
- Ready to move on when the sentence "Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz." is written unaided with an even slant and every letter inside each word joined.
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