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The Joy of Copywork

Things and Thoughts

21 Nov

by Sally Thomas

I’ve always loved copywork. In grade school, the nicest days – aside from the days when the art teacher read us Amelia Bedelia – were the days when the teacher handed us a poem, purple, damp, and vaguely vanilla-scented, fresh from the ditto machine. Generally it was a poem of the season, some rhyme about falling leaves, or Halloween, or turkeys, or snow, or wanting someone to be our Valentine, or violets, or Easter eggs, or . . . you get the picture. This was a blessed window of time when nothing else was being demanded of us. We could sit quietly, moving our pencils to form words kindly provided for us, to spare us the burden of having to think of them ourselves.At the time, I thought of copywork as nothing more than a nice thing to do sometimes, because the teacher wanted some decoration for the bulletin board. It was handwriting practice, of course, but more than anything, I suspect that from the teacher’s perspective it was useful busy work, and that the real window of peace and quiet was hers. Now, though, as I watch my own children do copywork – not seasonally but daily – I begin to understand the richness of the learning that this simple task makes happen.In a Charlotte Mason education, copywork is, in a primary way, about penmanship. Copying strokes, copying letters, copying whole words:  in this way the non-writer creeps into the mechanical actions of writing. The brain and the hand have been working together for some time now, pinching cheerios from the high-chair tray, scribbling, squeezing play-doh, coloring in coloring books, drawing with sidewalk chalk, throwing a ball. Now, though, what the brain has to comprehend, and the hand perform, is the replication of something that’s not just a mark or an image but, instead, a piece of language, with its own name and sound.
Unlike a scribble, which can be said by its creator to be a cloud, a sheep, or a story, a letterhas to be recognizable to the world. Legible letters go together recognizably to form intelligible words. From the perspective of the grownup, this seems a given so obvious that the process is hardly worth thinking about. I can dash off a grocery list without considering that the word eggs is made up of letters. As I’m writing that word, I’m not thinking about E – I’m already thinking milkbutterflourchickenlaundrydetergent . . . A six-year-old, on the other hand, is thinking, Eeeeeeeee . . . Geeeeeeeee . . . Geeeeeee. He might also be thinking Ehhhhhh . . . Guuuuhhhhh . . . Guuuuhhhhh, if he’s phonetically aware enough to know that the letters he’s writing represent sounds that add up to the word egg. Either way, though, to write that word is a labor.As adults, we’re all too likely to forget just what a labor this is. We think, Why can’t you just write that whole workbook page of Es? Why can’t you write “egg” five times on the line provided? Look how nice your writing was the first time you wrote, “egg,” and how sloppy it is by the time you’re at the fifth try. What is wrong with you? What’s wrong, however, is not with the writer but with the whole picture of the handwriting workbook, with its pages of repetitious exercise. Miss Mason would say – rightly, I believe – that to write the word once, as a best effort, is better than to write it once well and then badly, out of sheer exhaustion, four more times.As a means of teaching penmanship, copywork seems almost too simple to be believed. Writing egg once, as beautifully as one can, is really better than writing it over and over? That’s it for handwriting for the day? It can’t be true – but it is. Over time, of course, the writer progresses to longer words, groups of words, phrases, sentences of increasing complexity, paragraphs, poems. And all too quickly, though you might not believe it, these days of struggling to write egg dwindle and vanish in the rear-view mirror.All the while, the writer is engaging in a daily workout not unlike playing scales on the piano. To play the concerto, the hands have to exercise, to train themselves in strength and control. They have to learn to work in perfect union with the brain as it processes what the eyes tell it about the notes on the sheet music. As the eye sees the C-Major chord, the brain has to know that it is a C-Major chord, and the hands, at the same instant, have to play it. Practice is about unifying those three separate physical and mental actions, so that they aren’t three any more, but one.When we see a child struggling to master a challenging piece of music, we understand that it’s an uphill battle. And we’re not even asking the child to make up his own music. We’re not standing over him saying, “Okay, you’ve played ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ – now write your own song.” What we too often don’t consider, as adults, is that the struggle to write – and especially to write independently — is even harder, in its way, than learning to play music. Our written language is a complex system. Its spelling is complex. Its grammar is complex. Its vocabulary, all its seemingly infinite shades of meaning, are even more complex. To its novices, though they use it in speaking every day, its rules are an overwhelming, even paralyzing mystery.

And so I’ve come to love copywork for much more than its penmanship potential. What I’ve come to value about copywork over the ten years I’ve been watching children do it is that it teaches writing far beyond the level of mere handwriting. It’s an exercise in writing good words, good sentences, good paragraphs, even good poems – spelled correctly, punctuated correctly, in legible print or cursive, without the impossible pressure of, on top of the stress of the physical act of writing, also having to think of something to say.

What copywork frees the child to do is to write well, to render something – maybe something he hasn’t even thought about thinking yet – into better prose than he would quite be capable of on his own, particularly when the mechanical task of handwriting still consumes so much of his concentration.  As a composition program, as the composition program we’ve used in the elementary years, I’ve seen its implicit lessons soak in. For example:  today my eleven-year-old son sent me an email. It said, “Hi mom if you would send me an email so that I could add you to my contacts that would be nice.” It’s a terse missive, which is typical of eleven-year-old boys, especially when writing to their mothers, but really kind of impressive in its small way. For one thing, I notice that he has, after all, learned to spell difficult words like would and could without asking. And effortlessly, without appearing even to think about it, he’s pulled off a pretty syntactically complex sentence, piled up on the front end with dependent clauses.
The sentence could maybe do with some commas, but as a tossed-off little piece of writing, it is, as I say, not unimpressive for an eleven-year-old boy. The high-school students whom I tutor in writing are still laboring, after years of formal instruction in the classroom, to strain out basic subject-verb constructions. My son is an avid reader, which helps, but what I think is significant is that he’s spent his school years writing other people’s sophisticated syntax. Eventually, inevitably, magically, that kind of thing transfers. I’ve seen it happen before, but every time, I marvel.

So:  copywork as composition course? Again, really? It seems too easy to be true. If you didn’t believe me, I wouldn’t blame you, but I would introduce you to my sixteen-year-old. He was the first of my children to homeschool from the beginning; he was the first of my children to do virtually nothing by way of language arts but copywork, from the time he was five until the end of sixth grade. And at eight, nine, ten, eleven, he was what I suppose you would call a minimalist in the writing department. In fact, if you had asked me to come up with a metaphor for his writing process, milking a rock would be the phrase that sprang to mind. Recently my husband came upon an old notebook in which this son, at nine or so, had begun to keep a journal. The journal consisted of two sentences – Hello, my name is J. I’ve got it good. – and two hundred blank pages. Having had, previously, one of those insatiable-novel-writing-girl-type children, I found his reticence in writing a little worrying. Still, day in, day out, he did copywork:  poems, paragraphs, anything I could think of to give him. It was literally the only way to get him to write more than one sentence about anything.

When he did begin to write independently, at twelve or thirteen, his writing was like something emerging from a chrysalis,  more or less fully formed,  certainly more ready to fly than I in my anxiety would ever have imagined. At fourteen, through a series of serendipitous events, he wound up sitting in on an upper-level college history course – that is, the original idea was that he was just sitting in. It was a designated “writing-intensive” course, with seven papers, including a ten-page research project, and we assumed, as one does, that he would pass on those opportunities. He – shocked us is not too strong a phrase here – by not only insisting on writing all the papers, but making an A on every one. At this point I began to worry less about his compositional skills, and about whether or not I was doing enough to teach writing to the younger children. Copywork seems too simple to work, but it does work.

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Here, finally, in no particular order, are some of my favorite copywork resources and practices:

The Mead Primary Journal. This is a primary-ruled composition book with a space at the top for illustrations. My nine-year-old daughter’s copybooks are always heavily illustrated;  my eleven-year-old boy’s not so much, unless the copywork involves swordfighting. Once kids can handle narrower lines, we move to regular composition books;  I prefer the bound, marble-covered ones to spiral notebooks. They just seem more journal-y and keepsake-y somehow. I don’t keep everything my children do, but I have kept copybooks.

The Daily Office. More than once I’ve had to tell my confessor that instead of praying, I was looking at a psalm and thinking, “We’ll use that verse for copywork on Monday . . .”

Anything the children are reading. I pull from history reading, science reading, literature, poetry, the catechism – anything. I look for ideas I want them to meditate on as they write, but I’m also looking for syntactical variety and sophistication, examples of various usages of punctuation (currently we’re doing a lot of quotations and written dialogue), and challenging vocabulary.

For writers who have become more fluent in letter formation, I love gel pens. Girls especially like writing in pretty colors, and once they’re past the need to erase a lot, I encourage enjoyment of writing by making sure they have nice things to write with.

For little people, tracing paper. With my kindergarteners, I’ve begun by having them trace letters and words, then move to tracing and copying.

Generally I write out the passage for them to copy. I either write it on every other line, so that they can copy right underneath, or I write it on the left-hand side of a double-page spread, for the child to copy on the right side. My own handwriting has improved a lot  . . .

We often listen to classical music while copying. It’s the ideal calm-down activity, either to begin the school day or as a quiet transition between lessons.

14 Responses to “The Joy of Copywork”

Leila says:

November 21, 2013 at 11:29 am

A wonderful post. I couldn’t agree more with all of it.
I loved your essay about Duffers not Drowning, by the way, and tried to convince FT to let me link to it with no firewall. Alas, no go. But I will link to this!

Amy Caroline says:
November 21, 2013 at 11:37 am

Over the years of homeschooling (almost 10 now!) I have really come to understand that handwriting is so essential. It teaches a child so much. And no matter how many fancy programs you get nothing works so well as copywork!

Betsy M says:
November 21, 2013 at 12:57 pm

Hi, thanks so much for this post. (I had found it via Leila’s pinterest.) My 10 yr. old struggles with sentence composition so I will be adding this into our day.

Dina says:
November 21, 2013 at 7:09 pm

Thank you so much for this. I have always wanted to do more copywork but never have been able to fit it in. I think it’s time to make some room.

How much time do you allow for copywork in your day?

Melanie B says:
November 21, 2013 at 9:35 pm

Sally, This is wonderful. Thank you so much.

Can you talk a bit more about copywork for the students who are just learning to read and write. When do you start? Do you wait until they have a basic reading fluency or learn writing at the same time is reading. Do you spend a lot of time making sure they are forming their letters correctly? Making them start on the top line, etc. Does it matter all that much how they form each letter so long as it looks good? You say you have them use tracing paper. How does that work exactly?

Do they do copywork every day too? I’m thinking I might have a rebellion on my hands if I try daily copywork, but maybe I just need to keep my expectations low and just have them do one or two words until they get used to the idea? Bella will copy out words spontaneously once a week or so and Sophie will voluntarily work on the formation of letters occasionally, but I’ve been reluctant to force the issue too often. I’m not sure why, maybe because I’m already feeling a bit overwhelmed myself and don’t want to overburden them?

Sally Thomas says:
November 21, 2013 at 11:41 pm

Dina — currently five to ten minutes daily. One of my two children still doing copywork writes really fast; the other writes really slowly. We do it either right at the beginning of the day or, if we’ve started with “basket” (prayers, catechism/saints, read alouds), I do it as the transitional activity into independent work.

Melanie — A lot has depended on *when* my kids started reading. My youngest didn’t read fluently until she was almost nine, but she had been doing copywork for years by that time. I was really kind of convinced that that was how she was learning to read, by doing the mind/eye/hand thing. I’m still convinced that it helped her a lot. Anyway, I definitely did not wait for reading proficiency to start copying.

Already it’s kind of hard to remember what I did in the very beginning, except that we used tracing paper a lot. I would write something very brief, like a word, and have the child trace over it with tracing paper. All of mine really liked tracing on tracing paper, and then you can color it around what you’ve written and hang it up for a stained-glass window. We even did some fairly long passages by tracing, and sometimes I’d have the child dictate a letter to a friend, which I’d write out and he/she would trace. Whether their friends thought it was weird to get letters written on tracing paper I don’t know, but that’s what we did.

Then we’d move to my writing something on the primary-ruled paper, and the child would trace directly onto my writing, then write on the line below. Again, I just had to play with what they would tolerate, though I don’t remember any real rebellion (and I do have the kind of children who rebel). I would try to pick funny things, or lines from books they really liked, or tiny little poems. In the beginning, once we were past the single-word stage, they might copy a line a day of a quatrain, and then have the fifth day off. I’ve also had them copy grocery lists, recipes . . . I can’t think what else, but in the beginning it’s definitely not all great literature. I make it about whatever our everyday uses for writing are.

I really don’t know how I’ve gotten my kids to comply with daily copywork. It’s not that they’re super compliant, believe me. We’ve just always done it. I do have one son (he of the email) who gripes a lot, but he gets it done. Both my boys are kind of dysgraphic, and handwriting has been a struggle — in fact, where I’ve really seen the fruit of copywork has not been nearly so much in the quality of their penmanship as in the quality of their composition. Anyway, they have special notebooks, we turn on classical music . . . and they just do it. Even if we do nothing else, copywork and math are the non-negotiables.

And my daughter likes to illustrate. Her copybooks, which are one of the few school items I keep sentimentally, are full of winsome little pictures. The second photo in this post is of her copybook from, I think, first grade, when she wanted to write everything with curlicues. Mind you, she was not reading. We had to read through whatever the passage was together so that she knew what she was writing. But she wanted to write with curlicues . . . which of course nobody can read, but it was a stepping stone. The passage was obviously a Bible story, I think Joseph and his brothers. Anyway, her copybooks are cuteness itself, to me, anyway. Her brother’s, meanwhile, are full of stick figures fighting with swords and light sabers. No matter what the copy assignment was, if he illustrated it at all, it was with stick figures fighting with swords and light sabers.

One thing we did use several years ago (so, they would have been about 8 and 7) was a series of books called Draw Write Now. They’re themed — we have one on American history, one on Antarctica, and a couple of others — and each lesson takes the child through the steps of drawing something (a boat, a seal, a log cabin, and so on), with some fairly simple sentences to copy after. You could align a particular book with whatever you want to study, but I just let my kids choose what they were interested in, day to day. Those they both really loved.

Melanie B says:
November 22, 2013 at 11:30 pm

Thank you so much for all of this. I’ve been putting off copy work because Bella can be so resistant. But now I’m thinking maybe I should prioritize that over reading practice, bump it up and make it into a non-negotiable like math. I suspect she’ll be like your daughter and learn to read by way of writing. At least that’s been what she’s been leaning to on her own.

I picked up tracing paper at the grocery store today and the girls loved it. After doing three words, Bella took her paper around the house and traced all the Anthony-scribbles on the walls which we haven’t got around to cleaning up yet.

Bella did curlicues too for a while. I discouraged them because they annoyed me. Maybe I should have just let her go with it if they made writing tolerable for her. I like your idea that it’s a stepping stone.

The Draw Write Now sound like something I should check out. Antarctica caught me eye especially. That might work it it has lots of penguins especially.

Sally Thomas says:
November 22, 2013 at 8:32 am

I should also add that the fact that copywork is the only writing I assign in the elementary years does not mean that copywork is the only writing my kids do. It’s the just only *assigned* writing. On their own, they’ve kept journals (of varying brevity), written fan fiction, written their own stories, written emails and chat and letters. I just don’t make those things part of school. Some of my elementary-aged children have written more than others, but by the late elementary stage they do seem to emerge as people able to write independently when the need arises, and real need is the need that arises within themselves.

Another of my overall favorite writing resources is BraveWriter.com. We haven’t yet done any of their classes, and I don’t even own her books — though I really do think I need to break down and buy The Writer’s Jungle. But I read her blog and get her “Daily Writing Tips” in my email, and they’re excellent. I’m using her strategies with my tutoring students, though that’s an uphill slog . . . With my own children at home, BraveWriter mostly reinforces my sense that writing is writing, and that I should look for it in the everyday, not discounting the writing kids do as part of their interactions with technology, for example.

Where copywork fits into this picture is as the daily practice with linguistic tools. Over time it does make them pretty facile with language. So does reading, of course, but actually *using* in writing the language you’re hearing read aloud or reading for yourself is a huge and crucial element.

Sally Thomas says:
November 22, 2013 at 8:49 am

Oh, and Melanie, to address another of your questions: I did not spend that much time on letter formation (see “rebel,” above), but I kind of wish I had. What I wish I had spent tons of time on when my 11-year-old was little is pencil grip — correct letter formation is important only in that a) the letters are legible, and b) the way the writer writes them doesn’t slow him down, but a poor pencil grip is a handicap, and it’s very, very, very hard to change in an older child. By “poor pencil grip,” I mean a child holding the pencil between his thumb and three of his four fingers, which is what my son naturally does. We’ve worked and worked at it, and at this point we’re just working with it, but it’s a challenge, and I wish I had focused more on that one issue when he was small and his habits weren’t as set. I often wonder how in the world a teacher with 20 kids in a classroom manages a thing like this.

The same website that sells the Draw Write Now books — I think it’s called Draw and Write Your World — also sells all kinds of helpful tools for forming good pencil grip: actual rubber pencil grips of various kinds, triangular colored pencils and crayons, even a funky little mechanical pencil with a sort of fork in it so that you have to use only your index finger as the “guide” finger when you write. We’ve tried them all, and I wish I had known about them earlier. The child in question can write legibly — his print is quite good, but it’s laborious, and I’ve been using cursive for the last couple of years to try to help him gain fluency. It is helping . . . maybe because I was much more a stickler when it came to learning how to form those letters.

The thing about copywork as a daily habit is that once it is a habit it’s a great way to grab a moment’s peace. You can just hand it out and say, “Okay, I’m turning on the nice music. Let’s write.” And they go to it. It’s the one form of quiet busywork that I don’t mind at all, for all the reasons I outlined above. At first that window is tiny, five minutes or less, but it eventually gets bigger. So even if you feel overwhelmed, making copywork a part of the rhythm of your day can really help with that in the long run. And if your children like to draw, and there’s the possibility of adding an illustration, that’s a plus. That’s why I love those Mead Primary Journals so much. We’re still using them this year, even though my almost-10 and 11-year-olds have technically outgrown them. The 11-year-old could not manage cursive without the primary-ruled lines even now, and the almost-10-year-old would weep if she didn’t have the blank space to draw in.

Jennifer G. Miller says:
November 22, 2013 at 10:42 am

Love this, Sally, especially that you use the Divine Office excerpts. I’m often thinking the same thing.

Sally Thomas says:
November 22, 2013 at 2:19 pm

Oh (flooding my own thread here) — I should have remembered that for those who don’t want or don’t have time to find and write out copywork themselves daily, those Memoria Press copybooks are hard to beat. We’ve used those, too, and they’re really nice. Also, some children respond better to what looks like a workbook than like something Mom in her infinite on-Neptune-ness put together . . .

Cassie says:
November 22, 2013 at 4:43 pm

Great post! : )

Lauren says:
December 18, 2013 at 11:54 pm

Hey there! I have a student who copies things incorrectly and it’s becoming a big problem. In the proofreading activities we do, the students are asked to proofread a paragraph, make the necessary corrections/notations, and then copy the sentence correctly in their notebooks. One student continues to do the edits correctly, but his copied paragraphs are full of mistakes. His mistakes while copying include capitalization, punctuation, and spelling. Do you have any suggestions or strategies for me to teach this student to help him copy more carefully and identify his copying mistakes? Thanks!

Sally Thomas says:
January 17, 2014 at 12:16 pm

Hi Lauren — Sorry I missed this a month ago, when you posted it, but on the chance that you’re still visiting here, I’ll go ahead and respond.

You don’t say how old your students are, but up to roughly sixth grade, I think it’s better to give children *correct* passages to copy — correct spelling, punctuation, grammar — to help them develop an instinct for how written English should look. I have a child who tends to copy carelessly — she’ll skip a letter or a whole word in her hurry — and my challenge is to have her slow down and take care. Often I address this by giving a shorter passage, to encourage her to concentrate on each letter and word. CM would say that *one* word written beautifully and correctly is worth more than a long passage done badly. This work helps the child to internalize how things are supposed to look, which makes editing and self-correcting much easier at later stages.

I don’t do proofing exercises with younger children (under middle-school age). I do point out mistakes in copying, but I don’t give them something incorrect to look at before copying. I think of CM urging the teacher to cover a misspelled word immediately, so that the child doesn’t see it and have the incorrect spelling imprinted on the mind. Children don’t learn to do things right by looking at examples of things done wrong — later they do have the critical faculties to discern this, but not in the elementary years so much. When we did a more workbooky language-arts program, what I found was that yes, my kids could, for the duration of an exercise, apply a principle that told them where to put commas and capital letters, but that that principle did not transfer at all into their own writing. What has helped immeasurably is having them just copy good written English, with no mistakes. If they make a mistake, then it’s a deviation from what’s on the page (which maybe looks more authoritative because it was printed that way — maybe instinctively they don’t trust, or even see, their own little marks superimposed on the text), and they can see that clearly.

For an older student (middle to high school) who can more easily do that critical-distance thing, of looking at something that’s incorrect and knowing how to correct it, I’d have one of two thoughts. One is that doing “exercise”-type paragraphs is busy work — it’s not dealing with real writing in which the student has any investment — and the student, intuiting that the paragraph doesn’t really matter in the great scheme of his cosmos, is just checking out.

The other — which is really just an extension of the first, I realize — is that in a true revision process, the student would have written something of his own and would then practice the good habit of seeking a proofreader by having another student read it, while he reads someone else’s writing. The principle here is that too often, when we look at our own writing, we see what we meant, not what we actually said, so that seeking another pair of eyes is a necessary step — it’s what professional writers do all the time. Receiving the piece of writing back from the proofreader, the writer — and here he is being a writer, not just a student doing an exercise in which he pretends to be a writer — then has the burden of revising it so that it does actually say what he meant it to say, better and more clearly than he said it the first time. Having an investment in the writing, and having the sense that what he’s doing is real, and not just an exercise, is for many students an incentive to work carefully.

These are my thoughts in the framework of CM, anyway. If you’re a classroom teacher, I realize that you may have less control over what your students are supposed to be doing at a given stage — my own, and CM’s, notion of what’s age-appropriate diverges pretty sharply from standard classroom praxis. So please take my thoughts for what they’re worth to you in the situation in which you find yourself.

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A Tour of the MA website

Here is a brief tour through the website, including how to find the introduction, overview, subject helps, and level landing pages. We have also included a tour of level 1A as an example of the resources available for most levels, and a quick look at the high school levels.

Beyond a Blade of Grass: One Boy’s Digital Vision

By MacBeth Derham Recently I took some students on a hike in a familiar swamp. They trod the well-marked trail, and chatted cheerily, remarking on the many changes to the trail since the storms of last autumn. Trees were down, or, if they had fallen across the path, had been cut and removed with nothing left … Read More about Beyond a Blade of Grass: One Boy’s Digital Vision

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