I thought that I would give a little insight into some of our schoolwork today. You can get some idea from Evie's checklists made for herself, above, what one of our a school days looks like. This is from a day when I was going to be gone for a good portion of the time. Unlike me, my kids love checklists. We don't make them every day, though perhaps I should implement that idea, and while doing so, explain to Evie how to spell "piano" among other things, correctly, more than 50% of the time. Hah.
Something I've recently added to our school days is copy work for the younger kids as simply an exercise to improve penmanship and concentrate on grammar (as opposed to gramMER), punctuation, and spelling. My older girls, Cate and Grace, do not need to do copy work. Especially Grace. Somewhere down the road she got inspired to make her handwriting beautiful. The rest of us just drool over it. Here is a sample of her doodling the other night.
What is copy work? The idea is to pick a passage out of a book, or a poem, or a beautiful example of the English language of some sort, and the kids copy the passage down as neatly and accurately as possible. As a child is learning to write, asking for perfect spelling, penmanship, grammar, punctuation, oh, and please write something creative and beautiful, is quite overwhelming. So I try to separate creative writing from the time that I insist on perfect spelling and penmanship and all those other things. Copy work is the time we concentrate on the other things. Many people have written about this in depth, who I am sure have much more eloquent things to say on the subject, so I will just add the couple of things that we do that you may find helpful. They spend just 15 minutes a day doing it. Home school moms, if you are adding something new to your daily routine, let me suggest that you just start with consistent, 15 minute-per-day intervals. That way, it will get done every day and you will not become overwhelmed. It's pretty easy to squeeze in 15 minutes a day to learning a new skill. For the long term, you will be much more consistent if you only need to spend 15 minutes per day on something.
Secondly, I suggest making sure your children (or you! why not?) have a beautiful fountain pen that is delightful to write with when doing copy work. If they are at the stage where they will really be erasing a lot, then use instead a wonderful mechanical pencil with a substantial eraser. Think about this, you guys. Have you ever written with a beautiful pen that glides over the paper that made you wish you had beautiful handwriting to justify the pen and ink you were using? It is just so much more fun to write when you love the tools you are using. Again, many folks have written substantial articles on this, but in short, I will say that I have found my kids write much better and concentrate so much more on their penmanship when they are using beautiful tools for the job. Think of how you feel when you take extra time to get dressed up in the morning, taking the time to put together a nice outfit and style your hair (as opposed to those mornings where it's a sweatpants kind of day. We all have those days, too, of course). Getting dressed up causes you to square your shoulders a bit, stand up straighter, and feel less lazy. That's sort of the effect I've discovered that beautiful writing tools have on my children's handwriting.
Okay, one final thing I'll add. For improving printing, graph paper works so well. Those little squares really help children to make uniformly shaped letters, and it's so fun to use, as well. Try it. Get a lovely pen, find some graph paper, and start printing words. It's so much fun! The more you practice, the better your writing will look, and you will love looking at the neat results! Graph paper is just great to use for school work, in general. Math problems line up so neatly on those even little squares.
I feel I need to add a caveat: I laid out the ideal, here. The reality is, lots of days, good pens and pencils and graph paper go missing. No one can find the book they are copying out of. The dining room table never got wiped off after breakfast and no one wants to write on a table that's sticky with maple syrup. Or whatever the case may be. Here's the thing with ideals: have a goal in mind that you are striving for and do your best to meet it, and don't sweat it when everything isn't perfect. That's the key for not losing your mind if you are a mom, especially a home school mom. Have a goal in mind. Do your best to meet it. And don't forget to look at progress being made, and not allow yourself to get bogged down with day to day stuff. The monotony and frustration will overwhelm you. Stick to the plan and you will see progress. I promise.
Okay, well that's as much as I have time to write about today. Let me close by showing you a final picture of the saga my son Jude began writing. The Long Adventure, books 1, 2, and 3. He informed me he has another three or so in this series, and then he has plans for a new series. I can't wait to see what the new series will be about. I wonder if it will be as Tolkien-esque as the current series he is writing...
