My ds6 almost 7 will need handwriting practice this year. Has anyone incorporated copy work and handwriting as one lesson? How effective is this method?
As long as he knows how to write in cursive and has something to compare his writing too, then it should work if it is only practice he needs. If he still needs to learn how to write in cursive, then it might be difficult. We used copywork to help improve Ems handwriting. It was great for practice. She learned cursive in K so it was a matter of improvement, not actually learning how to write in cursive.
I love Pentime penmanship workbooks! You can get them through RainbowResources or through CLE. There's a page of letters/words to practice, and a page of copywork. The copywork may include poems, Bible verses, or brief paragraphs about a theme (like States, or animals, or birds).
I use Startwrite. It lets you type and print off just about anything so it works well with copywork. It even lets you print off the little arrows so a child knows how to form the letters. Your child can trace letters or copy beneath them.
We did copywork with printing, too. There are two ways of doing this. You can use something like Embassy said, which has the child using the same paper. Or you can have them copy from a book onto their own paper. If you do this, you might want to type the lines you want copied on the computer, using a bigger font and skipping lines. This makes it much easier for the kid. The book has SO MANY words, and they're SO SMALL!!! It just helps the kid concentrate better, plus it's easier to see that it's "only" three lines....
I found a list of famous, short quotes online. I used K paper, wrote the sentence on the top line, then had the kids write it again below. I've used this both with printing and with cursive (although my ds says I do cursive differently than his teacher so sometimes it's a bit of a mystery game LOL). There is also a great website online that lets you enter in your sentence, then print off the page.. let me see if I can locate it.. http://www.handwritingworksheets.com/flash/printdots/sentence/index.html Here's a list of quotes similar to what I've used. Actually, a few of these I HAVE used. http://en.proverbia.net/shortfamousquotes.asp?page=1
I might add that I REALLY like this paper: http://www.rainbowresource.com/prodlist.php?sid=1310472155-1012727&subject=9&category=2066 You can also get it blank at the top for drawing pictures and then writing about them.
