My family received a complementary Lifetime Membership to Homeschool Copywork in exchange for this review. Normally, I’m not one for lifetime memberships, because I assume that automatically puts you on a hit list. Seriously, you know that if you win $5000 a week for life from Publisher’s Clearing House, you’re toast as soon as their budget gets tight. But in this case, we jumped on it. Homeschool Copywork doesn’t seem like the kind of place to have a hitman on the pay roster.
In fact, Homeschool Copywork is quite the opposite. Their site is a beautiful combination of copywork ebooks touching on a variety of topics for all age groups.
There are several different levels of handwriting in the ebooks. Your youngest writers can trace over the dashed letters. Older children can try various forms of printing as well as cursive. There really is something for each age level.
What I love about copywork is that it replaces the boring subjects, such as spelling and handwriting. Instead of writing “Abe ate Abel’s apples,” children are writing beautiful Scripture, quotes, historical facts, and other highly interesting phrases that stick with them throughout their lives. That’s so much better than Aa Aa Aa or spelling lists!
Here is a very brief sampling of the many available books:
- animal alphabet
- character building
- Vincent Van Gogh and Monet
- Beethoven and other composers
- the armor of God (which is what Elijah is working through)
- poetry of Emily Dickinson, Lewis Caroll, E.B. Browning, and others
- hymns, such as Oh Love That Will Not Let Me Go and Be Thou My Vision
- holiday topics, such as Thanksgiving and Christmas
- historical topics and quotes, such as the Wright Brothers and John Audubon
- coloring pages
- notebooking pages
There are many, many more!
Some contain beautiful artwork for coloring which makes it even more fun to display the children’s copywork.
Elijah is currently working through this beauty:
He writes it on notebook paper, but you can print the ebook page or use handwriting paper, depending on your preference and paper availability. We use what we have…because we have it…so we use it.
Additional thoughts for my fellow roadschoolers:
Now normally with downloadable products, I’m griping about data limits and poor internet access. In this case, I haven’t a single gripe. The books download quickly without any hitches and use minimal data.
Obviously, there are no weight issues, as the books are ebooks and are lighter than air.
The one issue you may find is with printing. Ideally, especially for the younger set, you would print the sections of the ebooks you want for each child. We didn’t do that, although we will when the four-year-old is ready to participate, so she can trace the letters.
This is how we use it:
We choose the page they would copy and display it on the computer screen, and they copy it onto regular paper. It’s not as much fun, and we still have to have paper on hand, but it does save on printing costs and the annoying printer set-up issues that you have when you have 10 people living in a 30-foot trailer and you have to store your printer in the Cave of Wonders (or someplace equally as inaccessible).
That boy needs better lighting. We’ll get right on that.
Seriously, I can see no reason why this wouldn’t work for travelers. Can you?
To find out what stationary homeschoolers have to say about Homeschool Copywork, click here or on the banner below:
