Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Getting Back in the Groove

Catherine likes copywork. I want her to get a little practice with her grammar. The result today was that I put a quote up on the dry erase board and she copied it down.

One Ring to rule them all,
one Ring to bind find them,
one Ring to bring them all
and in the darkness bind them


Who doesn't know what that is from?

Anyhow, Catherine was delighted and copied it down quickly. I have hidden motives of course. If she's doing copywork I figure she can't help but get more familiar with spelling and since her spelling is absolutely horrible, that's a good thing.

After that, the activity seemed to grow. There was a space for a picture so Catherine drew one. She planned it out on scrap paper and designed it to reflect the mood of the quote. Then I had another idea. Why not copy the lines again but this time find the verbs and substitute other, sillier verbs? Then draw a picture that reflected the different mood of the result? She thought that sounded like fun.

We haven't got to the second part yet though. I have to make a run for the laundromat to dry clothes (It's been three days of rain now and I have no dryer) but she'll finish it up this afternoon. It's got me wondering if that might be a good repeat activity. Find a quote for copywork, have her do it then have her do it again after isolating one part of speech and replacing it. We can cover handwriting, punctuation, spelling, grammar and art all in one activity.

7 comments:

Luke Holzmann said...

That sounds like a great idea!

~Luke

Anonymous said...

Look at you being all hip, homeschooling mom. Excellent idea, by the way. Mind if I steal it?

Anonymous said...

I am not hip... I do not know the quote. I am not into sci-fi or fantasy though, so that's probably my downfall. All those capitalized Rings give its source away though...

Dawn said...

Steal away! I have a feeling we're going to do more with it tommorrow (I'll have to post her results from today then) so I'll have more to swipe as well. :)

Lorraine, knowing what the capitalized Rings meant means you have a little geek inside you that just wants to be let out. Get thee to a tolkien book!

Anonymous said...

LOL. I just know it because hubby yaps about such things. He is a fantasy geek, so is his daughter. I'll get the books for them. They share library books all the time that I have no interest in. It's cute to watch them both peruse the YA fantasy section at the library then head to the adult fantasy section.

Anonymous said...

It's July anyway, kids aren't allowed to learn in July, it's not in the curriculum. So stop it.

molytail said...

K, so I have to admit that I've never read the LOTR books nor have I watched the movies. Yet. I *want* to watch the movies & actually have them here, but I never have any movie watching time of my own and I'm not sure about letting Cindy watch them with me.... they're rated 14A, I believe - I don't usually do anything beyond PG with her... the odd time, but it's movies I've seen and I know what's in them....hem haw hem haw.. LOL

Hey do I get partial geek status if I told you not to forget your towel? (No, not the movie - I refuse to watch the movie! It'll wreck it all for me, I just know it.)