Writing with Ease

One of the best resources I've run across for doing the Charlotte Mason/relaxed thing when it comes to copy work is Susan Wise Bauer's Writing with Ease curriculum.

I've always been enamored by the efficiency of copy work.  Since my kids don't take to handwriting (with the exception of my youngest) and since learning to write revealed itself as something we struggled with in unschooling (See my post here about why we do formal lessons in handwriting), copy work has proved itself to be of immeasurable help!  Copy work teaches:  penmanship, grammar, spelling, vocabulary, writing mechanics and literary analysis.  That's pretty efficient for 10 minutes at a pop!

We did our own free form copy work for a long time. I or the kids would just pick something to copy and these resources varied greatly.  However, I am so lazy that even having to gather the resources and get the kids to decide what they wanted to copy felt burdensome.  It was a preliminary step to just sitting down and getting the  actual copy work done.  My youngest kids seemed to enjoy penmanship books more, simply because they were ready-made.  So we moved into using them.  But while penmanship books may do some of the work of copy work, they don't do all and I kept thinking that we were missing an opportunity to make the experience richer than it was.

Then I discovered Writing with Ease.  All I can say is Susan Wise Bauer is brilliant!  I love the way these books are laid out.  I love the literature selections she uses.  I love the way she includes narration and dictation.  I love the short and sweet lesson time.  I love the intelligence behind the whole program.  The only problem is if your kids are learning cursive, I find I have to write out the passage to be copied in cursive first, so that the child can copy it over in cursive.  Not a big deal.  My kids have a very hard time looking at something in print and then copying it over in cursive.  It takes a long time for them to get fluent in cursive.  This is probably due to their eye tracking problems.

You can buy the guide in hardcover that instructs you in Susan Wise Bauer's methods and gives suggestions for copy work for a year.  This is the least expensive option, I believe.  I plunk out the money for the workbooks because, again, I am too lazy, and I love that everything is set up for us.  It truly is just pick up and go.  I think you can also download and print out pdf's.

I also ignore the grade levels.  I think that Writing with Ease 1 is for 1st or 2nd grade.  But since my kids are late readers, it didn't make sense for us to do things that way.  I think the passages are very challenging and can easily be used for older kids.  Right now we are about to start Writing with Ease 3 with my 12 year old.  I think if you make things too challenging kids get frustrated and are so busy rising to the level of the material they don't have time to really take it in and make it their own.  On the other hand, we had been doing Writing with Ease 2 last year but because of a developmental jump in my son, that seems too easy right now.  We didn't complete the book, and we just took a semester long break from it.  Again, I feel free to use a curriculum as best suits us at any given moment and try not to spend one second feeling bad about not doing things exactly as the author visualized.  The curriculum is a tool!  Remember the principle of subsidiarity.  You and the child decide what is best, not some stranger who is seeing things from a very different perspective.

The best thing about Writing with Ease is that all the learning comes from books.  Living books that children really read.