{"id":3224,"date":"2013-11-21T12:46:10","date_gmt":"2013-11-21T16:46:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/materamabilis.org\/ma\/?p=3224"},"modified":"2020-02-09T10:06:53","modified_gmt":"2020-02-09T14:06:53","slug":"the-joy-of-copywork","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/materamabilis.org\/ma\/the-joy-of-copywork\/","title":{"rendered":"The Joy of Copywork"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"by Sally Thomas<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always loved copywork. In grade school, the nicest days \u2013 aside from the days when the art teacher read us Amelia Bedelia<\/em> \u2013 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\u2019s 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 \u2013 not seasonally but daily \u2013 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:\u00a0 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\u2019s not just a mark or an image but, instead, a piece of language, with its own name and sound.
\nUnlike a scribble, which can be said by its creator to be a cloud, a sheep, or a story, a letter<\/em>has 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<\/em> is made up of letters. As I\u2019m writing that word, I\u2019m not thinking about E<\/em> \u2013 I\u2019m already thinking milkbutterflourchickenlaundrydetergent<\/em> . . . A six-year-old, on the other hand, is thinking, Eeeeeeeee . . . Geeeeeeeee . . . Geeeeeee. He might also be thinking Ehhhhhh . . . Guuuuhhhhh . . . Guuuuhhhhh<\/em>, if he\u2019s phonetically aware enough to know that the letters he\u2019s writing represent sounds that add up to the word egg<\/em>. Either way, though, to write that word is a labor.As adults, we\u2019re all too likely to forget just what a labor this is. We think, Why can\u2019t you just write that whole workbook page of Es? Why can\u2019t you write \u201cegg\u201d five times on the line provided? Look how nice your writing was the first time you wrote, \u201cegg,\u201d and how sloppy it is by the time you\u2019re at the fifth try. What is wrong with you?<\/em> What\u2019s 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 \u2013 rightly, I believe \u2013 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<\/em> once, as beautifully as one can, is really better than writing it over and over? That\u2019s it for handwriting for the day? It can\u2019t be true \u2013 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\u2019t three any more, but one.When we see a child struggling to master a challenging piece of music, we understand that it\u2019s an uphill battle. And we\u2019re not even asking the child to make up his own music. We\u2019re not standing over him saying, \u201cOkay, you\u2019ve played \u2018Twinkle Twinkle Little Star\u2019 \u2013 now write your own song.\u201d What we too often don\u2019t consider, as adults, is that the struggle to write \u2013 and especially to write independently \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

And so I\u2019ve come to love copywork for much more than its penmanship potential. What I\u2019ve come to value about copywork over the ten years I\u2019ve been watching children do it is that it teaches writing<\/em> far beyond the level of mere handwriting<\/em>. It\u2019s an exercise in writing good words, good sentences, good paragraphs, even good poems \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

What copywork frees the child to do is to write well<\/em>, to render something<\/em> \u2013 maybe something he hasn\u2019t even thought about thinking yet \u2013 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.\u00a0 As a composition program, as the<\/em> composition program we\u2019ve used in the elementary years, I\u2019ve seen its implicit lessons soak in. For example:\u00a0 today my eleven-year-old son sent me an email. It said, \u201cHi mom if you would send me an email so that I could add you to my contacts that would be nice.\u201d It\u2019s 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<\/em> and could<\/em> without asking. And effortlessly, without appearing even to think about it, he\u2019s pulled off a pretty syntactically complex sentence, piled up on the front end with dependent clauses.
\nThe 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\u2019s spent his school years writing other people\u2019s sophisticated syntax. Eventually, inevitably, magically, that kind of thing transfers. I\u2019ve seen it happen before, but every time, I marvel.<\/p>\n

So:\u00a0 copywork as composition course? Again, really? It seems too easy to be true. If you didn\u2019t believe me, I wouldn\u2019t 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<\/em> in the writing department. In fact, if you had asked me to come up with a metaphor for his writing process, milking a rock<\/em> 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 \u2013 Hello, my name is J. I\u2019ve got it good.<\/em> \u2013 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:\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

When he did begin to write independently, at twelve or thirteen, his writing was like something emerging from a chrysalis,\u00a0 more or less fully formed,\u00a0 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 \u2013 that is, the original idea was that he was just sitting in. It was a designated \u201cwriting-intensive\u201d course, with seven papers, including a ten-page research project, and we assumed, as one does, that he would pass on those opportunities. He \u2013 shocked us<\/em> is not too strong a phrase here \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

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\nHere, finally, in no particular order, are some of my favorite copywork resources and practices:<\/p>\n

The Mead Primary Journal.<\/strong> This is a primary-ruled composition book with a space at the top for illustrations. My nine-year-old daughter\u2019s copybooks are always heavily illustrated;\u00a0 my eleven-year-old boy\u2019s not so much, unless the copywork involves swordfighting. Once kids can handle narrower lines, we move to regular composition books;\u00a0 I prefer the bound, marble-covered ones to spiral notebooks. They just seem more journal-y and keepsake-y somehow. I don\u2019t keep everything my children do, but I have kept copybooks.<\/p>\n

The Daily Office<\/strong>. More than once I\u2019ve had to tell my confessor that instead of praying, I was looking at a psalm and thinking, \u201cWe\u2019ll use that verse for copywork on Monday . . .\u201d<\/p>\n

Anything the children are reading<\/strong>. I pull from history reading, science reading, literature, poetry, the catechism \u2013 anything. I look for ideas I want them to meditate on as they write, but I\u2019m also looking for syntactical variety and sophistication, examples of various usages of punctuation (currently we\u2019re doing a lot of quotations and written dialogue), and challenging vocabulary.<\/p>\n

For writers who have become more fluent in letter formation, I love gel pens<\/strong>. Girls especially like writing in pretty colors, and once they\u2019re past the need to erase a lot, I encourage enjoyment of writing by making sure they have nice things to write with.<\/p>\n

For little people, tracing paper<\/strong>. With my kindergarteners, I\u2019ve begun by having them trace letters and words, then move to tracing and copying.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0 . . .<\/p>\n

We often listen to classical music while copying. It\u2019s the ideal calm-down activity, either to begin the school day or as a quiet transition between lessons.<\/p>\n

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