Our Copywork jar

This is something new we're trying this year: a Copywork jar.

Here is how it works. Each day for her scheduled Copywork time, Ella will go to the jar and pull out a slip of paper. I've organized it to give her some variety, so that each day of the week she'll be copying from different "genres", for lack of a better word. Here's the schedule I came up with:

Monday (pink paper)= Poetry
Tuesday (yellow paper)= Quotes
Wednesday (blue paper)= Bible verses
Thursday (purple paper)= Look Up...*
Friday (green paper)= Literature and History selections

*On Thursdays I have given her something to physically go and look up. Here are a couple of examples:
-Go to page 23 of the book you are reading and choose a sentence to copy.
-Go to the library basket, choose a book from it, and copy all the words from one page of that book.



Mark and I had a lot of fun choosing the passages for Fridays. We pulled our favorite read-alouds off the shelves and searched for the passages we knew Ella would love to revisit. Here is one of those:

Not until the light began to fade could she move away from the place. Then she ran so fast up the mountain that it was not long before she saw the boughs of the fir trees above the roof, and then the roof itself, and then the whole hut. On the seat beside it sat her grandfather smoking his pipe, and over the hut the old fir trees were rocking and roaring in the evening wind. Heidi ran all the faster, and before the Alm-Uncle could really see who was coming she threw her basket on the ground and hugged him. In her excitement of seeing him again she was unable to say anything, except to keep exclaiming, "Grandfather! Grandfather!"

~Heidi, by Johanna Spyri

Or how about this one?

"Ohh!" said Susan. "I'd thought he was a man. Is he-- quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion."

"That you will, dearie, and no mistake" said Mrs Beaver; "if there's anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they're either braver than most or else just silly."

"Then he isn't safe?" said Lucy.

"Safe?" said Mr Beaver; "don't you hear what Mrs Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you."

~The Chronicles of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis

I love it that Ella will be able to recall particular scenes and the characters she has loved in the good books we've read, as well as the memory of all of us curled up on the couch, reading these books aloud together as a family, and discussing them afterward.