Copywork hack!

[EKT]

We're into our summer schooling schedule, which for us means a little daily math, a little daily copywork, and lots of reading/read alouds. Instead of using copywork pages from, say, WWE or Brave Writer Arrows, I decided to just pull it from our current read aloud. During the school year, I typically do language arts one-on-one with each child. If I'm pulling copywork from a read aloud, I usually stick our current book in a cookbook holder, so the child can easily see the text for copying. This generally works well, but since we're doing school stuff all together each morning for the summer, having both girls share the same book at the same time for copywork has...not been working, lol. So, it dawned on me to just photocopy (on our home printer) two copies of the page in question. Now, I take those two copies and a highlighter, and just highlight the sentences I want copied. (I typically select a page that we've just read the night before during read aloud. I also pick different passages from the same page for each girl, so they are doing different work and don't compare. I also generally give the older child a longer passage.) Long story short, this has been working really well so far, and it takes me all of two minutes to prep! Mostly, I feel like an idiot that I didn't think of doing copywork this way before. It's so much easier for everyone involved. Anyway, thought I would pass it along, in case anyone else finds it helpful! :-)

P.S. Our current read aloud (my girls are 8 and 11) is Splendors and Glooms by Newberry Medal Winner Laura Amy Schlitz. We're a little more than halfway through, and it has been a huge hit! If you love historical fiction (this one takes place in London, 1860), and you love spooky, creepy, witchy stories, I highly recommend! (It's set in fall and winter, so it would be a good one to put on your list for the fall, but it's been on my to-read list forever and I didn't want to wait any longer, so we just dove in. I don't regret it.) The language and descriptions in this book are gorgeous, making it particularly great for copywork.