Not copywork, obviously, but a pen-and-watercolor-wash drawing by my youngest daughter, who is an art major (though she wants to be a studio sound engineer, and we're trying to figure out how to work that certification in, since her college doesn't offer anything like that, but that's another story for another day). As you might imagine, this child's copybooks from her earliest schooling days were always illustrated, and I have hung onto them as precious keepsakes. I have also hung onto copybooks filled with drawings of stick figures fighting with light sabers as precious keepsakes. No favoritism.
People frequently ask about copywork: how to approach it, how to make it happen on a daily basis. As an executive-function-challenged person who is not naturally good at habit-building, here's a thumbnail sketch of how I did get it to work as a daily habit in my home, with rather naturally chaotic children --- read: also some ADHD, not surprisingly, since they would have gotten it with both genetic barrels, so to speak. Anyway, I had marvelous, vibrant, creative, interesting people who were not necessarily your standard compliant Instagrammable homeschooling poster children, but simply themselves.
Here is an informal essay I wrote years ago on this topic, explaining what I believe is the value of copywork, why it's such a crucial part of the homeschooling day, even though you don't spend huge amounts of time on it. I really do believe that it does a lot of your language-arts heavy lifting and would absolutely cut formal grammar in the elementary years rather than skip copywork.
So, what did I do that worked?
*2 lines at a time, chosen by ME if I did not want the choosing process to take all day. Kids had plenty of scope to choose stuff, but having them choose their passages to copy did not work AT ALL in my house. I chose at random from Scripture, school books, poems, etc., always somewhat above their current natural level of writing ability (never their own writing).
*Written down for them in a notebook. Copying from some other text/source did not work for me at all. I used those cheap marble-cover composition books and, for kids under about 9, would write the passage (again, 2 lines) on every other line, and have the child copy underneath until this became second nature. This practice cut down on mistakes and frustrations for a young writer.
*From about age 9, I moved to laying the composition book out flat, so you're looking at two pages at a time, a double-page spread. I would write the passage on the lefthand page (the back of the page the child had last written on). The child would then copy onto the righthand page of the double-page spread.
*I encouraged the child to look very intently at a whole word, then try to copy it without looking at it, rather than copying letter by letter, once letter formation was fairly solid. Eventually, chunks of words, 2 or 3 at a time, without having to look back because he was holding them in his mind.
*Even my late-elementary kids still copied only two lines daily; an older child might do four. Making copywork last only five minutes at the absolute most meant we did it every day, because it wasn't onerous. The point is not to do a lot at a time; the point is to do it consistently, every day, without fail, until the child can't imagine not doing it. In fact, it was usually the very first thing we did, to signal the start of the school day and the transition from play mode to sitting down, paying attention.
At some junctures I made my own pre-made copybooks. Here is one, which I believe I used for Mater Amabilis Level 3. Note that even at this level, i.e. middle school, I kept daily copywork BRIEF. We had a lot to do. Copywork was important and by that time an indelible part of our daily routine, but it was a thing to touch, for five minutes or less, not spend an hour on. We were also doing studied dictation by this time. I notice, looking back at this document, which I made for our own personal use, that I didn't consistently list sources, but to the best of my recollection, other than scripture and Shakespeare, I used sentences and brief passages from some of the public-domain texts MA uses in that level, plus a public-domain grammar text, Sheldon's Advanced Language Lessons, which I'd found through some online source.
I also made a copybook for my First Communion classes, back in the day --- I used this instead of the rather twaddly second-grade activity book that is meant to accompany the Faith and Life text. I pulled lines from a public-domain version of the Baltimore Catechism, but arranged them to correspond to Faith and Life chapters. Here is a cursive edition of the same.
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