Copy Work and Creative Writing

Bear really enjoys copywork.  I choose poems or write out sentences for her to trace or to read and copy.  Initially, the sentences I chose went along with our Classical Conversation history sentences and I used handwritingworksheets.com to create a printable.  I got tired of using up ink for those, though.   Now, she is copying things from her First Language Lessons book - namely the poems.  She usually requests certain poems that aren't even meant for copywork.  I bought a pad of primary lined paper and write her copywork in pencil.  She traces it in colored pencils.  Sometimes I choose a light colored pencil and she traces in regular pencil. Sometimes I put a dot where she should start each letter, especially letters I know she still writes incorrectly, like the f and the m and n (she starts the two latter from the bottom and starts the f as if it were an l).

This was a poem to teach the days of the week in one of the FLL1 lessons.  She requested it as copywork.

This story was a FLL assignment (to use the pronoun I and write a story involving yourself).  Bunny is the name of her doll (named after Bunny of Discovery Days and Montessori Moments, I kid you not).  She dictated the story to me and was to copy it.

Long pieces of copywork don't always get finished and I don't require that she finish at this point.

Copywork is important because it allows a student to practice good writing (and I don't mean penmanship, although it aids in developing that as well).  By copying her narrated story, she gets to practice where a sentence starts and ends and the conventions used to depict those, as well as other punctuation marks.  It does transfer, eventually, and my husband and I have noticed some transfer in her own creative writing.  She has begun using periods to mark the end of sentences.  Copywork also allows her to be able to start writing smaller.

As for creative writing, she loves to get new sheets of stickers, stick them all to a page and then write her own story.  We have been doing these since she was 24 months.  She would put all the stickers on the paper and then dictate her story.  Now she writes them herself. 

Here is one she wrote over the weekend. She wrote a great one with princess stickers during our trip to Costa Rica, but I can't seem to find it.

 Raccoon was going to play ball but first he had to find a friend.  Mouse was too busy.

 Then Raccoon said, (the comma and quotation marks are a mini lesson I mentioned after I read her story and praised it) "I will go and look for someone else." (She was resistant to the idea of quotation marks, btw, so I let it go.) Rabbit said, sure after I finish my carrot.  "Ok (said Raccoon). After that we will have a tea party

 a big tea party. Everybody will be invited. Hamster, we are having a tea party." "Ok."

Stickers are a fantastic way to inspire a child to write.  Toys work well too.  I once had my third graders (who were obsessed with Littlest Pet Shop) bring their LPS toys to school for a creative writing assignment.  Needless to say, that won them over to loving writing:)