Bigger Question: Copywork- writing amount

[lharris]

This is a quick Bigger question. How many of you make the child write the headings to all the science activities or is the parent allowed to do this if the child is doing the copywork listed. He can do portion of the Preparing to Build exercises each day, plus copywork of a doable verse, plus spelling and dictation exercises each day. But the writing including in heading exercises for science and history sometimes seems to put him in overload. His writing skill seems to do better in small doses, is that the same for other moms out there? My son is 8 and in 3rd grade. How do you handle the science headings in Bigger?

[MomtoJGJE]

My DD1 is 8 and in 3rd grade... but we are 6 weeks away from being through with Bigger. So she's doing most of the work herself now. I do still write the headings and the questions on the science experiment pages, but mainly so she'll see what pages she's doing because a lot of that is independent for her at this point. She COULD write it, but I help her see what goes where if that makes sense.

When we were doing the beginning 1/3 I only had her doing 1 vocabulary word, all of the English was oral, and I would write a lot of things for her to copy for DITHOR. And I would let her take two weeks to write the poems, and occasionally we would just not do the poetry copywork.

Then I had her do the poems in one week (still skipping some of them), 2 vocabulary words, I'd help her write the things for DITHOR and we still did Eng orally.

Now she does all the vocab words that are in our dictionary, she copies all the poems, and she does all the Eng written work. It was a progression, but I always had her write the notebooking (minus the title), timeline, and science work. I will put the scripture at the top of the page for science notebooking and she copies the verse, and I write the scripture and the vocab word at the top of the cards.

Does that help any? I guess all that was a long way about saying, if he's just starting, it's fine to ease into the amount of writing involved in Bigger.

[pjdobro]

Last year when doing Bigger with my dc who were 8 at the time, they did do most of the notebooking and science lab sheets themselves. We were doing Cheerful Cursive for the year though so we did that instead of copywork. The copying of the poem in addition to everything else would have been too much for them at the time and handwriting was covered with Cheerful Cursive. We did like the pp and gradually increased the amount of vocabulary words that they did each week and always did at least 2/3 of R&S orally. I love that the writing is spread out well in Bigger so usually there is only one big demand on them each day like one notebooking page or similar. It is huge jump up though from Beyond as far as writing goes and it can be a challenge at first so it's a good idea to ease into it. I think there was a time or two early on in the year when I typed out a few things for them on their notebook pages, but by the end, they were doing all of the work themselves.

[my3sons]

I think it's just fine for you to write the headings, especially since your ds is doing the poetry copywork. We started with Riley doing the poetry copywork spread out over the week, and me writing the science headings. Halfway through, we stopped the poetry copywork, and he was writing the science headings. I think this is quite flexible, as long as dc are improving their writing ability/strength throughout the year. I do think it's important dc write the science question, their guess, draw their own procedure, and their own conclusion, as doing this will help them better to retain it.

In Christ,
Julie