As your child's copywork and dictation progresses, you will learn through experience how to decrease the clues and increase the level of difficulty so that your child continues to be challenged. Use various forms of writing for copywork as well, so that he can practice with poetry as well as prose, and dialogue as well as essays. For each one, begin with copywork, pointing out the characteristics of composition and punctuation that are specific to the form, before moving on to dictation. As he moves into the dialectic stage and begins more a more studied approach to writing, he will be well-prepared. His tutors will have been, and should continue to be, the most excellent writers of the English language.
Young children love to copy simple Bible verses, biographical quotes, or seasonal poetry.
Older children may enjoy copying speeches, quotations, essays, or passages from books they love. We have collected many quotes from friends on mailing lists, pasted them in a wordpad file, and printed them out. By cutting them up into separate quotations and putting them into a basket, we have created our own eclectic copywork file that is fun and easy to use for those days when we want a taste of something different. Our older daughter is permitted to choose up to three slips of paper from the basket before deciding which one she would like to copy. To determine the appropriate level of complexity in the copywork you choose, you may want to consider using your child's spelling and vocabulary words as a guide.