the WRITE Balance: Homeschool Copywork Review: More Than Just Handwriting Practice

From the very beginning of our lives, we learn what we see. When our children see what others do, they attempt to imitate it. Whether you have a good example or a poor one, we still work to create our own version. A great way to ensure success in our children is to make sure they see others succeeding around them. A child learning to play the piano should hear great pianists play! You wouldn't expect a chef who had never had great food to be very good at his job. The elements involved in handwriting, like spelling, punctuation, and even reading comprehension, are treated in the same way at Homeschool Copywork with the added benefit of memorization options as well. They provide a number of significant poems, hymns, and stories to use in handwriting practice and general copy work in ebook form ready to download and save for multiple uses. This surrounds your students with meaningful literature and significant words while also training their hands and discerning eyes to write and communicate well. This is an especially great asset to those using a Charlotte Mason or Classical education model.

For this review we received a Lifetime Membership to Homeschool Copywork which gave us access to all of their downloadable products. Since my son is learning to read, his handwriting is certainly in progress so we mainly focused on Animal Alphabet Copywork pages first and then moved onto Transportation Copywork, both of which are good for PreK, Kindergarten and 1st grade students. In both collections, each page had a word or phrase to copy and a corresponding illustration for coloring. I really appreciated that several words were less trivial or mundane, and a few even included the definition if it was a particularly uncommon word like nimbus and lorry. My son really enjoys his coloring lately and the illustrations are like those from coloring books. More than once he asked if he could skip the writing part and just color the picture! I chose to print out the entire collection of pages at one time so he could access them himself easily as we're getting started in the morning. It turned out to be a nice warm-up for school activities.

With my son being young and even dragging his feet at times, you might wonder if this kind of thing is worthwhile until he is older and able to stick with some of the more literary collections like works of Lewis Carroll or Emily Dickinson. Something I've discovered about our family is how heavy we lean to gradual learning. Small amounts of something most every day over time results in solid learning and improvement. Beginning simple copy work like this now is setting the stage for an easy transition into the great masterpieces later. Some of the other products available come from all manner of subjects including artist studies, scriptures, poetry, great quotes from composers, presidents, and authors, holiday themed pages, coloring books and even themed blank notebooking pages for when you have a customized assignment. In some selections from the upper elementary and junior high section there are cursive options as well as regular print. If you think Homeschool Copywork might be a good fit for you, keep in mind there are three separate membership levels: Free Membership (includes only free products), One Year Full Membership ($29.95), and Lifetime Membership ($45). If you expect to use these products for longer than a year or with multiple children and you would like more than what the free level offers, the Lifetime Membership really is the best deal because you will always have access to everything. And finally, here are some more products they offer: