Copywork selections 2016-2017

These are selections for Hero to use in copywork and studied dictation this year. This won't get us through the whole year, but it will get us started. The plan goes like this:

Day 1: copy the passage
Day 2: corrections and spelling
Day 3: grammar check; dictate to Mom - and correct it
Day 4: dictate to Hero




"God has given you eyes; it is your duty to God to use them."
-Madam How and Lady Why

Four ducks on a pond,
A grass bank beyond,
A blue sky of spring,
White clouds on the wing;
-Mother Goose

Never stand begging for that which you have the power to earn.
-Miguel de Cervantes

"Adam stood there between the wood and the river, shivering in his wet clothes. He could go no farther."
-Adam of the Road


 "We believe in God the Eternal Father, and in His Son, Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost."
-First Article of Faith

"I never saw a moor,
I never saw the sea;
Yet know I how the heather looks,
And what a wave must be."
-Emily Dickinson

"God's Book, which is the Universe, and the reading of God's Book, which is Science, can do you nothing but good, and teach you nothing but truth and wisdom."
-Madam How and Lady Why

"Ask, and it shall be given you; seek and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: For every one that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened."
-Matthew 7:7

"The houses and cottages, each in its garden, clustered together along both sides of the road, while the fields and the meadows and the pasture land and woodland spread out all around them as far as the eye could see."
-Adam of the Road

"There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry."
-Emily Dickinson

"Children of our Heavenly Father
Safely in His bosom gather;
Nestling bird nor star in heaven
Such a refuge e'er was given."
-Hymns  p299

"He always reads to rest himself from his labors, finding that after work nothing refreshes so much as communion with a book that teaches us the best that others have done, said, and thought."
-Storybook of Science

"Come all ye young fellows that follow the sea,
To my way haye, blow the man down,
And pray pay attention and listen to me,
Give me some time to blow the man down."
-Blow the Man Down

"And as all have not faith, seek ye diligently and teach one another words of wisdom; yea, seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith."
-Doctrine and Covenants 88:118

Preparing for Studied Dictation

I've been wanting to do more with our copywork and dictation for Hero, but I've been uncertain as to how to go about it. Turns out, there's a lot of tutorials out there on how to use copywork and dictation to teach language arts. Here are some of the resources that I've learned:

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DICTATION is a natural way to teach proper spelling to a child. The words are meaningful because they are taken from the child’s schoolbooks. They are also learned in context, rather than list form, which also aids the child in remembering how to spell the word. -Higher Up And Further In

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I thought this was especially interesting, because it made me think of how I'm working on learning Japanese -- in many ways, I'm doing a variant of studied dictation, but without a person to read it to me like a mom/teacher would. This is encouraging: I know that what I'm doing with Japanese is effective, and this being so similar, it should work very well, even though it's a huge departure from the usual spelling list method.

After reading the whole article, I still had some questions about what it might look like in practice. When I googled, hoping for more blog posts, I ended up with a bunch of YouTube videos in my results, and those are very helpful.





After our first exercise, I went looking for more suggestions from the lovely ladies on Ambleside Online. And here are a few more things they said could be helpful:




--They've collected Miss Mason's thoughts on the topic.

-- He's used to oral dictations, now his brain needs to be trained to do written dictations; there's going to be a transition period.

-- It's ok if it takes more than a week; don't do the final dictation until he's prepared well enough to be confident that he can do the whole passage perfectly.

--Ask him to look at the words, then close his eyes and picture them before he writes. If there is any part that he's unsure of, then he should do it again until he can see the whole passage in his mind's eye. 

--Copywork examples can be placed progressively further away, or on the reverse side of a folded over notebook, in order to require him to hold a detailed picture of the writing in his head. 

--The Ambleside FAQ has a section on copywork, what is meant to be happening, and how to get there; our copywork can be more effective than it currently is. 

--Put a post-it over errors, then have them write the correction on it, so they only see the correct way of doing it.

--Don't over-correct. If you get a lot of errors (and you should study till that's not a huge issue) then just chose the most important one or two to deal with.

Links Links Links

An interesting take on teaching good writing - using very short essays: Teaching to the Text Message.

I'm thinking about doing this oil-on-the-paper experiment to explain about birds staying dry when they're on the water. Also, it just sounds cool. They said they couldn't stick their fingers through wet paper if it had oil on it. I want to try!




A pair of very good questions from the Representative from Texas:
"We have to remember, a no fly zone is an act of war. Now what moral right do we have to participate in war activity against Libya?" AND
What would we do if someone slapped our United States with a no-fly zone and sanctions, and then started bombing to enforce it?

Additionally, if we ARE going to go to war, it's Congress's job to decide, NOT the president's. He's commander once we decide to go to war, but the decision is not his to make.



Also, here is Susan Wise Bauer doing a dictation with her 13yo son. While it's not an exciting pair of videos (you spend a lot of time watching him write), I found it very instructive as to what dictation actually looks like. I didn't expect that there would be so much grammar instruction in the process. And she basically had him do the problem orally before wrote it, which surprised me because I'd conceived dictation as a primarilly written sort of thing. And that, altogether, is very interesting.



For further reading on why this matters, try the message boards here first and then here.