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When does copywork begin?
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When should copywork begin? I have a 6yo boy who is not reading yet and is still leaning phonics vowel sounds. He hasn’t had much interest and gets frustrated easily, so I’ve been taking it extremely slow. Am I suppposed to wait until he is reading? I’ve heard that boys may not read well until 2nd grade or so. Should I wait that long? My daughter was reading well in K, so this is a new expereince for me. I’m not stressed about it in any way, I know he’ll catch on when he’s ready, but I am just wondering if I need to wait on the copywork or begin it for fine motor skills development.
You can begin very early. My four year old has been practicing the letters of the alphabet with pudding, playdough, pipe cleaners, with his finger on my hand, he is using dry erase markers, and finally a large pencil once he has the strokes down. I have been using pentime hadwriting with my 6 year and 8 year old this last year. I have really like them. The last two years I have tried a few different handwriting books and settled on this one. For the first grade there are two books. the first book slowly introduces a new letters and then reviews all the letters that they have previously done. If she doesn’t feel confident enough to do the letter I have her practice with dry erase markers and sometimes some of the idea’s that my pre-schooler does. Then I have her start writing some of them in her book. Sometimes she is discouraged because not all of them are really good. I reassure her that she will get better. Sometimes we even look back of some of her first pencil attempts of the letter and then some of the more recent attempts. She loves to see the improvement. Something else that she does is circle the letters that she is very happy about. Then with a beaming smile she calls me over to come and look at her circled letters.
With my first child reading was slow, and we were not very consistent with handwriting the past couple years. This last year he is really beginning to have confidence and excitement over both. There is a lot of wisdom in taking it at their pace and to worry more about them enjoying the learning, instead of trying to push them ahead. Its wonderful that you are doing that. I have often felt the pressure of trying to keep them up with the cousins, but have seen the benefits of slowly things done when needed.
I second the idea of using a white board or chalkboard before attempting pencil on paper. You could easily make his copywork lesson reinforce his reading lesson by having him review and copy on the board one or two of the words he learned to read (after he knows how to form the letters, of course).
I third the idea of a chalkboard; especially using shorter chalk as it will help develop his pincher grip. When my dd was that age, I made dots with the chalk and she traced over them with her chalk. We used the HWT for Pre-K (Get Set for School), K (Letters and Numbers for Me) and 1st (My Printing Book), then we went to full fledged copywork; I’d found Presidential Penmanship that she could use the HWT style with the famous quotes. She also got great use with HWT Stamp and See Screen. We followed the succession in the book and used the large wall cards; with each new letter a week that she learned, she colored that letter wall card then we put it up in her room for her to look at for about 2 years or so. Those letters are also great for practicing letter sounds.
Now, at 9, doing freehand and she’s switched to D’Nealian because it’s prettier and the cursive is, too; she likes it. The transition has been fine. I am thankful for the first few years of HWT. I will be using Startwrite for the copywork now because I can have copywork for her and her brother (who is switching from Zaner-Blouser)to trace over for learning the D’Nealian cursive.
Just take your time and do it in small increments.
Rachel
We started doing copywork when dd5 got bored with the handwriting workbook we were using. She knew how to form all the letters and was just getting bored writing them over and over again (and therefore acting silly/fighting with me about doing it). I started letting her choose a sentence from a favorite storybook each week and she would copy that. We started with just a couple of words at a time, and have worked up to now she does about a half of a sentence each day. (These are longer sentences from our read-aloud books.) She is learning to read and really starting to take off with that, but I’m not necessarily that concerned that she is able to read everyword that I give her in her copywork. (Actually, she’s probably learned some new words that way, and it’s highly motivating to her because I let her pick the story that the sentence comes from!) At any rate, she really loves doing handwriting now, and even though we are on a ‘break’ from school now she will sometimes ASK me if she can do it anyhow!
All that to say is sort of let your son lead the way. If he is still happy practicing just letters in whatever format (with playdough, on a whiteboard, etc), then let him keep doing that for awhile. If that is getting to where is seems too easy for him, then I’d start ramping it up gradually – into words, and then parts of sentences, and then whole sentences.
Oh, and speaking of little whiteboards, I’ve found a really fantastic cheap way to make one is to just stick a piece of cardstock or paper inside a page protector. The whiteboard marker wipes right off the plastic with a tissue or a sock. And the beauty of this is you can customize it – stick any kind of worksheet you’d like to be able to reuse in there. We’ve had one that had a piece of that lined beginning handwriting paper inside, and have also used it with our MEP Reception worksheets for math (since they are all color – I figure then at least I can recoup the cost of all the color printing by being able to use them again.)
Jen
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