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Copy work help!
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copy work seems so easy and yet it keeps tripping me up!
I’ve been using spelling you see jack and Jill with my 8yo/2nd grader and it seemed to be going ok through book one. Last week she complained about the dictated words, and it seemed like she was bored with the words. I gave her the final dictation lesson from that book and she easily did it. So this week we moved on to book two. She copied I’m a little teapot three days. Today it was time for the dictation and she had a complete melt down because she “doesn’t know how to spell any of these words!” Even marking the vowel teams five days in a row, she had no clue how to spell the vowels in ‘out’. Now I can have her go back and finish book one, but that will only last six weeks. I Don’t think anything will change in six weeks. She wants to just do copy work. CM recommends starting dictation in fourth grade, right?
And then my oldest, 10yo/4th grade… I was using LLATL and he did the 2-3 sentence copy work and dictation ok in that. Well, since I dropped LLATL I pulled out SUS level E this week for him to use. Well, these passages are much longer. Six sentences a day. He can copy it ok, but when I ask him to copy it in cursive his writing is too big to fit the space. I don’t know yet how he’ll do with the dictation. I think I ordered the wrong level, it’s too big a jump up from what he’s done up to this point. I’m not sure what to do at his point. I really want him working in cursive, which SUS doesn’t do, so I’m not sure I want to spend another $50 buying a lower level.
I have start write software, I could make up cursive copy work. But I’m not sure what to pull it from. Pulling from literature books seems like too much work. Especially if I’d like to have him write it from dictation after he copies it. How do I pick the right level of difficulty? I looked at dictation day by day, but I’m afraid fourth grade would be too hard, but when I look at the second half of third grade, the passages seem so boring and preachy.
why does something so simple have to be so hard?
Have you watched Sonya’s video on Spelling Wisdom and how to do dictation (her recent one in the video blog series)?
They are fantastic!
Last year I tried SUS with my 2 kids. A couple things that I didn’t care for. The writing was in print. I know the reason, it is easier to do chunking when writing in print, but we write in cursive so it would have been a lot of work to do SUS and also copy work in cursive but I wanted them to continue to practice writing in cursive. That would be double the work. So I tried having the kids do SUS but writing in cursive, but that didn’t work very well at the time.
I also didn’t care for the fact that for a few days they have to copy the entire passage. It just seemed so redundant and unnecessary to write the same thing over and over again.
I rewatched the SW videos here on SCM and made the switch and have been so much happier. In each dictation passage there should only be a few words that is new to the student to spell. Those are the words that the student and I break down and look at the syllable breaks and phonograms that are used. We don’t do it to every word, just the words that are new.
Day one – student copies the work in their best cursive (and also does her ULW lesson)
Day two – student and I identify the new words, and break them apart understanding and practicing how to build the word. We also go over the grammar, and punctuation in review format.
Day three – dictation exercise
This works great because on Monday she does written narration, 3 days for dictation exercise (T, W, Th) and on Friday she does Jr. AG. (we are doing Jr. AG because we have to do bi-yearly standardized testing, but we only do one lesson/week. I know some of the things will come up in the testing and want her prepared and not caught off guard)
Oh and we didn’t start dictation until my DD was in 4th grade. Prior to that it was copy work that naturally moved into transcription.
They just copy into a notebook in cursive. Around 2nd grade copying from print text to cursive letters (in copy work) is not a problem, since we start with cursive for writing. We start SW in 3rd grade as copy work that transitions to transcription and continue using SW into 4th grade as dictation exercises.
I’m just trying to figure out how it would work for us. My oldest could use more cursive copy work, though he getting pretty good at copying print into cursive. I am goin to teach my 8yo soon, possibly this summer, possibly sooner. So she would need her copy work to be in cursive.
Im wondering how the selections in SW compare to the copy work selections in ELTL? That has the benefit of me being able to print them in cursive, rather than have to make up sheets myself…
We have liked Presidential Penmanship for copywork. You can choose print or cursive, which style and what grade level. They are on currclick. We also did a character and Bible based copywork from currclick. I think one was called Kind Kids copywork. They were both from the same publisher, one cursive my older son did and one print my younger daughter did. They do cursive copywork (after learning cursive formation) for a year or two before starting to translate print typed into cursive. My grade six son must do all of his work in cursive now, but he does spelling wisdom in manuscript printing because he says it helps him learn the spellings better. I am okay with that.
In that case you could do penmanship to work on cursive. Not long sections, but enough to practice. And also do SW in print or continue with SUS in print. As cursive becomes easier you could require SW in cursive so that it acts as copy work and spelling.
My DD copies the SW passage in cursive but for dictation prefers to use print because it forces her to slow down when writing which is what she needs to do (she knows the words but writes to fast and gets errors)
Side note… some kids never excel at cursive (or manuscript) and will find their own mix of cursive/print writing style. I start with cursive because the fluid movements are easier for my kids when young, and I want them to be able to read and write in cursive, but I already see my DD finding her own “mix” when it comes to writing for fun.
Sorry, I’m still trying to understand. Is there something specific about SW that makes it better than other copywork resources (like the ELTL selections)??
In my situation I find combining spelling and copy work to be a really nice benefit of using SW.
If spelling requires a lot of writing I don’t want to overload with copywork too. When we tried SUS it seemed like a lot of writing so by the time copywork came up my DD was tired of writing
We tried ELTL but I found that we did not have time to properly prepare for the dictation exercises, so we ended up dropping the ELTL copy work and dictation exercises and switching to SW that way it was combined. I also prefer the SW passages over ELTL selections, but that was just personal preference.
Both are good resources, ELTL was not a good fit for us, but I know many that like it a lot!
Ok, thank you for your help. I think I’m going to try ELTL, because the ease of all in one and the premade vertical cursive copy work will be really helpful to me right now. I’m hoping that since it’s a three day a week schedule, that I can have my son study and copy the dictation passage earlier in the week, to make it a true studied dictation.
As I looked again at the sample, I think level 3 will be the best fit for him both for studied dictation and grammar. But I’m feeling like I will hold off until fall to start it with the new school year. What I thought I can do in the meantime is to get the pdf of the level 2 workbook and print just the copy work pages. That will give me easy premade vertical cursive copy work for the rest of this year. That will leave us plenty of time to work on beginning written narrations.
If you want only copy work for right now she has “Handwriting Lessons Through Literature: A Child’s Garden of Verses”
I got it for free last year through her email and it is really nice, has all the “type” options available.
SCM also has Hymns In Prose available in cursive as a PDF. that is another good resource for copy work.
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