Boys and Copywork
Killer is my oldest boy; he's 9. He follows the Ambleside Online curriculum (sort of) and, as it adheres to the Charlotte Mason method, he has a daily expectation that he does something called copywork. In a nutshell, copywork is copying down an extract from another source, such as a good poem or a selection from a book or even from the Bible. The idea is that a child can practice writing neatly, can learn from a good example about punctuation, spelling, and grammar, and can do so in context (in other words, in a realistic setting and not as a list of random words, or as a fill-in-the-blank workbook). Recently, a friend of mine with a boy the same age was asking me about how much should be expected of her son, as she and her husband were nearly coming to blows about the number of words they were making the child write down every day, and the child was coming unglued because it seemed too much for him. Try to make writing a pleasant experience Just before I "reveal" my a...