Charlotte Mason: What's the Point of Copywork?

by Karen Edmisten | More from this Blogger

02 Feb 2007 10:03 AM

In this series of posts on CM methods, I've covered several of Charlotte Mason's ideas about education. Today, I'd like to touch on one that doesn't always get quite as much coverage as "living books" and narrations.

Copywork was advocated by Charlotte Mason as a way to teach handwriting, but also as the best way to teach spelling and punctuation rules, sentence structure and basic grammar. It was her theory that reading and copying excellent literature would lead to excellence in composition skills. I've used some of Miss Mason's ideas about copywork and have been really pleased with the results.

We started copywork when the children were very young. In our first year of homeschooling, my oldest was just in first grade, so her writing curriculum was minimal, but it did include copywork. I had her copy very short passages from her favorite books. Because the copywork selections were from beloved stories, they were much more interesting to her than a workbook. Copying a passage about how Wilbur the pig tries to spin a web is infinitely more fun than circling nouns in a workbook.

At first, it was mainly handwriting practice. Later, it became a way of enforcing the various aspects of composition. After making use of copywork for a couple of years, I expected to see miraculous results. I also assumed that because my children live with an English teacher and a writer, writing would happen naturally for them. Well ... yes, and no. It did seem to happen somewhat naturally. It just didn't happen quite as fast as I expected it to.

My oldest child is now the rough equivalent of a seventh grader, and I've seen enormous strides in her writing skills in the last few years. That's been the confirmation I needed to really embrace the CM wisdom of not requiring written narrations until a child is ten or older. I had hoped to see "written fruit" earlier than age ten. But, what I've seen is that focusing on oral narrations in the younger years helped shape the process of mental composition, and that concurrent copywork helped teach the mechanics of composition. They really are two separate processes.

But, finally, in the older and more mature child, these two separate streams of learning begin to flow together into one, smooth current. If your young child doesn't seem to be picking up on the fine points of writing, perhaps give a combination of copywork and narration a try. Copywork gives way, eventually, to excellence in writing.

For some excellent related posts, see Andrea's Putting the Grammar Back in Literature and Valorie's The Family Journal and Writing.

For a concise primer on implementing CM methods, see Catherine Levison's A Charlotte Mason Education.

Learn more about Karen Edmisten

Karen is the homeschooling, chocolate-loving mom of three daughters, whom she has been homeschooling since their birth.

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Julie Gentry (5915) 02 Feb 2007 01:47 PM

It definitely works!

Andrea Hermitt (5507) 02 Feb 2007 08:22 PM

I spent alot of time in Catholic school, copying from the history book... I think we copied from all the history books every year... then we took tests... that was it. It helped my writing, but not my history facts.

Senee (12) 24 Mar 2007 07:16 AM

Ah, the beauty of copywork! Personally for myself, reading quality books helped me to write composition, poetry, letters in a beautiful, solid language. But copywork is very helpful in lots of ways. First for handwriting, trademark cursive (signature's of their very own),proper information being journaled for their use later, but most importantly for them to gain speed (possibly) taking notes,elsewhere, later in life. I have found that children write better when given college ruled paper to write their entries on and if you use a 3 ring binder to store all those years of writing in they love seeing the diference between years. I incorporate copywork into history lessons about different countries, by having them copywork other countries poems, proverbs, etc. They, then, love all the different facts they learn in different lands & retain them.