Troubleshooting Charlotte Mason Copywork
In this series of blog posts, we want to tackle some of the most common issues that parents face in a Charlotte Mason Homeschool. We hope that the questions we recommend can help you find solutions, and we refer back to Miss Mason’s principles to help you apply them practically in your homeschool.
This week, we’ll talk about this issue: My child doesn’t like copywork, what do I do?
My child doesn’t like copywork.
Let’s look at the following questions:
1. How old is your child?
Society is increasingly pressuring us to teach our children to read and write at younger and younger ages, but the truth is that, physiologically, children’s fine-motor skills develop more towards 6 years old or older.
2. Can your child already read the words you’re having him copy?
In the Charlotte Mason method, we only start copywork when the child is able to read the words. That means a child who is able to write the letters at a young age but who still could not read the words is not yet required to do copywork.
3. Are you assigning a reasonable amount of copywork each day?
Then, when copywork begins, we start with a short sentence, and slowly progress to longer passages. But because each child develops at a different pace, it’s not easy to decide how many lines a child at a given age should be copying.
An easier way is to set a timer for copywork. Start with 10 minutes for a child beginning copywork in Form 1, increasing to 15 to 20 minutes in the next couple of years. Whatever the child finishes when the timer rings, that’s all he needs to do for the day. Do it again the next day.
4. Are you assigning copywork selections from living books?
Charlotte Mason copywork has the added benefit of having the child copy selections from living books, which means that the passage sounds nice to the ear and also contains living ideas within that can capture a child’s attention. This can be a hymn, a poem, a passage from a literature or history reading, or a passage from the Bible. We don’t assign them to copy text from dry textbooks.
5. Is the child copying from a different book each day?
In traditional school, we may have had the experience of being “punished” by having to copy a sentence over and over all across the paper. These kinds of copying exercises are understandably boring and something we would want to get over with as soon as possible!
In Charlotte Mason copywork, we make sure to copy from different books everyday, in order to provide variety while also giving our child the chance to emulate the writings from different topics. For example, we might copy a stanza from the month’s hymn on Monday, a paragraph from a history reading on Tuesday, a passage from a literature book on Wednesday, and so on. Mixing up the types of things that the children copy (including some poetry-style writings, such as hymns, poems, or Psalms in the Bible) helps keep interest level up.
Copywork in a Charlotte Mason Homeschool
Copywork is a maintay in the CM method, and we hope this post has helped you figure out why your child is struggling with it. Do let us know how it goes in the comments below!
*Most of this post is an excerpt from our book, Help! I Love CM, But… A Troubleshooting Guide for the Charlotte Mason Homeschool Parent, available on Amazon 🙂
