Copywork Demystefied

Have been SUPER busy the last few weeks.  TC was away for 2 weeks and single parenting in his absence just wasn’t fun.  😦 

Still busy today (I try to blog on Saturdays), so I thought I would do this one quick post on copywork which has been at the back of my mind for AGES!

In our homeschool, in learning English, our children do not do spelling lists like they do in school.  Nor do they do workbooks (yikes!), or for the first few years write compositions.  Charlotte Mason’s methods are different.  In a nutshell, for English, we read great books, do copywork/dictation, and require narrations. 

Today I would like to blog a little about copywork.  In fact I have to blog only A LITTLE because I just read a post from www.simplycharlottemason.com on the same topic and decided to ride on it, because Sonya has explained it all so clearly and concisely and even posted a video on how to do it, that there is little else to add.  The blog post can be found here:

http://simplycharlottemason.com/2010/10/13/copywork-transcription-dictation-language-arts-part-7/

What I did want to add was our own copywork selections, so that if you are inspired after reading Sonya’s blog, you can just download ours and get started!  I only had time to clean up the one our kids use in K2 or Primary 1.  Before that age, we do not do much “seatwork”.  I will post the selections for older children in the coming weeks.

If you want to read more about copywork, I have an older post on the topic here.

What to do with the Selection

There are 100 copywork selections in this file or 25 weeks’ worth since we typically do copywork 4 days in a week and leave the 5th for journalling.  Each week’s selection starts with a Bible verse.  If you are not a Christian and take those out, you’ll still have 75 you can use.  🙂 

What you will want to do is to read each day’s selection with your child.  Explain, highlight new words, discuss meaning, answer questions your child may have.  Talk about punctuation, capitalisation, spelling of unusual (non-phoenetic especially) words, etc.  No hard and fast rule.  It’s all done very casually.  Where the selections are longer, I have put in bold the words I want them to write, but left the rest in there for context.  My rule of thumb is whatever they can reasonably complete in 10 mins of focused writing.  Any more is pushing it.  So feel free to vary the lengths for your child according to his/her ability.

You can also extend it by having your child memorise selections – a Bible verse, a poem, etc.   Memory work is great for this age and they learn so fast!

Remember to insist on their very best handwriting.  And no mistakes.  Sit there with them and be sure to cover up any mistakes made or preempt by stopping them in mid-word if you see a mistake coming up, and asking them to look again at the word before writing it.

Be inspired!

They improve so much during the course of a year that they will probably go from copying letter by letter, to copying word by word and then phrase by phrase.  Let them dicate the speed at which they progress, but they should get to copying whole words and not letter-by-letter quickly because that’s where the real value is.  Once they start seeing the whole word, their spelling will automatically be taken care of.  We have never done spelling lists in this house and our kids spell well.  All credit to copywork!

And copywork can be so inspiring!  Select that which is worthy of thought.  It is amazing how many times my children have quoted copywork selections to illustrate a point.  Like recently, Alethea told Tim, “Whether you think you can, or whether you think you can’t, you’re right.”  And Tim said, “Hey!  I did that for copywork!”  Actually, since we use the same selections over and over again, our children have lots to share! 

When we were in New Zealand almost 3 years ago, we were sitting in the shadow of a building and the kids were feeling chilly, so Alethea stepped into the sunlight, stood there a while and said, “This reminds me of something I wrote for copywork: ‘It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light and winter in the shade.'”   It was a Charles Dickens quote!

PRICELESS!  I hope this inspires you to start using copywork with your children!

COMMENTS PLEASE!

If you download the file and use it, I would love to hear your feedback on it.  And if you find a mistake in the spelling, please send me a comment to let me know so I can update the file for future downloaders.  Remember we are looking for BRITISH spelling here, not American.  🙂  Looking forward to reading your comments!