Cursive Sentences to Copy

Three short sentences in ordinary print head three bands on this 3rd grade page, and each band has ruled lines below it for the child's cursive. On the sheet shown the sentences are: We like to read books. Tom has a toy boat. My dog can run fast. Only the first is given in cursive too, as grey writing to trace on its first line; the other two the child writes from the printed version alone. That step, reading print and writing it in cursive without a model, is the whole point of the page.

Copying from print is how cursive gets used in the third grade, for spelling lists, for copying from the board, for writing a sentence neatly. It asks the child to change every letter on the way from eye to pencil, and to keep the spaces between words while the letters inside them stay joined. The capital letters and the full stops are part of the task: We, Tom and My start with three different capitals, and each sentence ends with a period.

One sheet, three sentences. The first sentence gets three ruled lines, its grey trace on the first and two empty lines for the child's own copy, and the other two sentences get two lines each, so every sentence is copied twice, just as the instruction says. Children who finish can write a fourth sentence of their own on the back. This is the last face of the cursive writing family and the only one for 3rd grade.