Poetry Copying

A poem on handwriting lines

The preset loads the first verse of Twinkle Twinkle, set on four-line ruling with rows to copy onto. Paste in any poem instead.

The handwriting exercise is the same as any sentence sheet. What differs is the layout, and the layout is the lesson.

Line breaks are information

Prose wraps wherever the paper runs out. Poetry does not — every line ends where the poet decided it should, and copying a poem is the first time most children meet a line break that means something.

Which is why the instruction that matters here is: keep the lines as they are. A child who runs two lines together to save space has thrown away half of what makes it a poem, and has usually done it without noticing.

Point out the capital at the start of each line while you are there. It is a poetic convention rather than a grammatical one, and it looks like a mistake to a child who has just learned that capitals follow full stops.

Copying is how poems get into your head

Reading a poem takes seconds. Copying one is slow, and the slowness is the point.

Writing it out puts every word through the hand at the pace the line actually moves, which is close to how it sounds read aloud. Children notice rhymes they had skipped past, and they notice the rhythm because their hand is keeping time with it.

It is also how a verse gets memorised without anybody setting out to memorise anything. Copy one three times across a week and most children simply have it.

Choosing a poem

Short and rhyming, and worth having in a child's head afterwards. Four to eight lines fits comfortably.

Nursery rhymes work for the youngest. Beyond that: Edward Lear, Spike Milligan, Christina Rossetti, anything in the public domain that scans well. A poem with a strong beat is easier to copy than free verse, because the line lengths are even and the page looks orderly.

Avoid anything with unusual indentation. The engine sets each line from the left margin, so a shaped poem loses its shape.

Controls and printing

The poem, the font, whether letters join, trace style, rows per line, ruling colour and line height. A4 or US Letter.

Fewer rows per line than usual is worth it here, since the value is in getting through the whole verse rather than repeating one line four times.

Read it aloud before writing and again afterwards. A poem copied silently is a paragraph with odd line breaks.

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