Homeschool Copywork

As part of the Review Crew, we received a Lifetime Membership to Homeschool Copywork.


Now, we haven't done a lot of copywork in our homeschool, so I was curious to see what it would be like, and how it would go over with my students.

 

As it turns out, the first two things I printed from the site, weren't even copywork at all!  One was a St. Patrick's Day book for Katie, which came in 4 different versions.  I chose the one where she would be tracing a word on each page.

The next things I printed were some bird coloring pages.  The kids like to color while I read aloud.

Since I'd printed some birds, I thought it would be fitting to have our first copywork experience be from the John James Audubon packet.

This packet contains 25 quotes with bird pictures to color.  I have one student that prefers printing, and one that prefers cursive, so I printed some of each.

The Audubon packet is a whopping 191 pages, since each piece of copywork comes in different formats (print, cursive, with guidelines, without them).

After the kids did these pages, I decided they really didn't need the guidelines, so I printed the rest without them.

But back to copywork.  What is copywork, anyway?  Copywork is more than just handwriting practice.  You can get handwriting practice copying a row of Ms or Qs, but with copywork, your child is learning sentence structure, punctuation, vocabulary, and best of all, being exposed to new thoughts and ideas.

Speaking of new ideas!  When I saw the Dragons of the Bible pages, I knew the kids would be interested in those!  

I printed off several pages from this pack for both Hannah and Jack and let them pick which one they wanted to copy and color each day during a "transition" time.  (Please tell me I'm not the only homeschooler who occasionally needs her kids to be doing something for a minute so I can get my act together!)

I even printed a blank dragon page for Katie to color and copy the word "dragon" off the white board.

The kids were fascinated to learn that dragons are mentioned in the Bible.

We even used this opportunity to look up some of the verses, where we discovered that different translations sometimes use different words instead of "dragon."

Remember those bird coloring pages?

There are 3 levels of membership at Homeschool Copywork.  Free membership allows you to sample a limited selection of products, to see if this is a good fit for you and your students.  One year membership is $29.95, and might be a good choice for a family that is in their final year of homeschooling, or only planning to homeschool for a limited time, such as while stationed overseas.  Lifetime membership costs $45, and includes not only the wide variety of materials currently offered on the site, but also all the materials that will be added as time goes on.

In addition to the samples you can see on the site, there are several artist studies, composer studies, poetry, character building, holiday copywork, and early childhood themed packets, too.  I was thrilled to find copywork for hymns, too.  We're working on Be Thou My Vision right now.

Since Jack and Hannah have grasped the mechanics of cursive handwriting, I'm planning to skip purchasing handwriting books for them next school year and use Homeschool Copywork pages instead.  I think if I pre-print the packets on colored paper, it will be easy to assign a week at a time, like we're used to from our current handwriting books.  The nice thing about Homeschool Copywork is that I can print the same material for Katie in manuscript form (with guidelines) so that all my students can be learning about the same concepts.  Which makes discussions more lively when everyone can participate.

You can connect with Homeschool Copywork on Facebook and Pinterest (check out their Lego Homeschool board!), and owner Amy Blevins on Twitter, G+, and Instagram.




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