Copywork

Over the years I’ve fluctuated in terms of how much copywork I get the kids to do. It’s a helpful way for them to practise writing neatly, without having to think too hard about what they’re writing. Every so often I still get them to do it – probably only about once a week at the moment – but it can be quite a good activity for them to do while I read aloud. They can easily focus on forming letters neatly at the same time as listening to a story.

Writing neatly is not something many schools focus on these days, but many homeschoolers (and some schools) still recognise it as an important skill to have. To produce neat, competent writers you firstly must encourage them to practise; developing and strengthening those necessary muscles. Secondly, parents/teachers need to set high standards. This is something I have often found hard to do as a parent, but it actually only takes a few times of forcing them to repeat their work to drastically improve performance!

Even if neatness isn’t your goal, copywork can still be helpful to just practise the mechanics of writing.

So how do you do copywork?

You could really pick any book and have them copy a small – perhaps favourite – part out of it into a notebook/exercise book. You could even get them a special one, that looks pretty or special in some way.

However, I’ve personally found the easiest way to do copywork is by using set, pre-printed passages. This way there’s less time wasted deciding what to copy and fretting when a notebook gets messy or misplaced.

Here is a website I’ve found really helpful for free copywork pages that you can print and staple together. I’ve used many of their sets over the last few years and they work well. Probably the only issue is the formation of some of the letters, which is different to how I teach them. To address this I just advise the kids to pay attention to those ones and make sure they do it our way (eg. k’s and y’s).

Hopefully this great resource will be available to be used by many more homeschooling families in the years to come.