I feel there is a lack in the Language Arts of CM or can I keep going and my child will succeed…

How does copywork help if the child is a delayed reader and doesn’t know what they are copying?  My oldest is very delayed with her reading and if I were to give her the amount of copywork that she can do nicely, she wouldn’t have any clue what she was writing down.

For beginning readers I always had their copywork at their reading level, often taking a sentence from their reader book to copy. Sometimes that meant less meaningful thoughts such as “The cat sat on the mat.” Sonlight does this and I think it might be in Bechick’s 3 R’s. It helps reinforce what they are learning to read.

My youngest is still learning to read, but not a complete beginner reader and I have him copy from his Pathway reader.  I allow him to choose a sentence, but I usually encourage him to pick one with a new word in it. 

I had my oldest boy continue CW until a few months ago (he’s 8th grade) because his spelling was lacking from where I thought it could/should be.  He needed more time to focus on the words and not just skim over them.  I think this has made him a better reader (he still struggles a bit) and a better speller (although he still struggles a bit).  His issue is just wanting to skim over words.  I think LA is a bit more difficult for him for a variety of reasons and doesn’t like to “work” on it because it shines a light on his weak areas.  But if we don’t work on it/them, he’ll never get better.  He has vision problems and some kind of processing issue between his eyes/brain/mouth (my non-medical professional diagnosis). He needs to have a lot of literature in his face to remember and for awhile that was added copywork.

We use McGuffey’s for copywork, so they are working right around their reading level.

There was a recent discussion on grammar. I mentioned all the resources I’ve used with our kids. Each have had similar, yet different paths to formal writing. They all used PLL in an informal, cozy fashion to get started  McG readers have been used for reading/spelling, and extra informal grammar.

Our DS13 is doing Essentials over the summer (CC resource). It’s his second tour through it (intended to be used three years in a row). I dictate a sentence to him five days a week. We go over capitalization, punctuation, spelling, sentence purpose/pattern/structure and diagram it. Sometimes he even changes the purpose (declarative, exclamatory, interrogative, imperative). It takes only a little time each day, but covers an enormous amount of skills. This can be done with any resource. It’s made me see that he is finally equipped for prepared dictation as a better fit for spelling purposes. I can see how SW works by the way this is finally working. He was a late reader, has struggled with handwriting, but is now at a place where these skills are coming together for him. I knew they would. It’s just been a struggle not to compare to other’s appearances. His has been a long road, but he’s actually enjoying the reality that he can put words onto paper in order, usually spelled correctly. He’s been building keyboarding skills over the last two months which is also preparing him for more writing. It’s much easier than handwriting. I fully expect that over the next year he will be a fairly independent writer, right on schedule for highschool assignments. (I use IEW methods and sometimes resources because I started it with my older children and saw the results I want.) 

There have been many days I thought it wouldn’t happen. We just had to keep working at it in short lessons. The resources may not have always been CM specific, but we used them in a CM fashion. I’m willing to say her methods work well over the long term for all of our children. Some earlier, some later, but all just in time. 🙂

Becca<><