Within the last 10 years, copywork has been a successful substitute for formal curriculum. Many people are using copywork as an alternative to a formal handwriting program. Depending on what philosophy you follow or who you listen to, copywork could be a substitute for other subjects as well.
For the followers of CM, copywork is used to help the child improve their handwriting. Copywork is used all through a child's academic career. For those who are of the classical education persuasion, coypwork is used to teach the mechanics of writing: captial letters, punctuation, spelling, etc. Neo--classicists, notably followers of The Well-Trained Mind, only use copywork for Grade 1, possibly Grade 2 as well. It is used as a precursor to a formal writing program.
If you choose to go down the path of copywork, you would pick out a selection from various sources. Your choice may be from Scripture, a poem, or a passage from a well-written book. The child copies out those words in his/her best handwriting. With a beginning writer, you could start out with copying out sole letters of the alphabet, move on to words and then finally progress to sentences and paragraphs.
Our family does copywork a bit different than the above explanations. Let me give you an example with this poem:
April Rain
by
Langston Hughes
Let the rain kiss you.
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops.
Let the rain sing you a lullaby.
The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk.
The rain makes running pools in the gutter.
The rain plays a little sleep-song on our roof at night--
And I love the rain.
I would instruct the child to copy out this poem. Before he started, we would discuss about letters that should be capitalized, punctuation, and any words that had unusual spelling. After he had finished copying out this poem, then we would work on grammar. I would give him the definition of a part of speech that we were working on. For sake of explanation, let's say that the part of speech we are working on now is noun. I would ask him to find all of the nouns in this poem. I would list them out on a whiteboard. Then I would ask him to give me the common and proper nouns. I use copywork as our informal grammar lesson for the early elementary grades as I don't use a formal grammar program until the child is in Grade 4.
I will leave you with a few links that describes copywork at greater length.
Copywork for CM users.
Copywork for CE users
There are other explanations of copywork here and here.
Julia lives on the Canadian Prairies with her 3 children (9,8,6), attempting to give them a Classical Education. You can read more on her blog.
