Golden Lines

One element about the classical education model that I LOVE is copywork.  Essentially you find excellent passages in great literature and have the child copy it word for work including punctuation and all.  You also talk about it with them and point out different things based on the passage or what you are working on teaching your child.
So, they get to practice handwriting while also experiencing great literature.  They get exposure and practice with using different types of punctuation like quotations, semi-colons, commas, etc and literary elements like metaphors, similes, onomatopoeia, etc.  They also get to learn some grammar as well, through actually writing and working with well-written sentences!
I feel that it is a GREAT way of teaching them all of these skills, and the best part is, you can really use any book that you are reading...so we select great classic novels to read aloud for fun and then talk about the great writing while we read...and then they copy samples into their notebooks.  No boring old workbooks for us!  
For example we were just reading Ramona the Pest this week, and there's a passage where Ramona is thinking about the homonyms "which" and "witch".  And it's cute and fun and uses both words several times.  SO, I selected that as one of our copywork passages for the week.
Another passage (3 paragraphs long or so), talks about Ramona getting a new pair of shoes that go "trip-trap" and so she uses that phrase over and over to show the reader the sound her shoes are making.  A great example of onomatopoeia!  So she got to copy the great sentence structures and use of punctuation, practice her handwriting, and it was also a great little lesson about using onomatopoeia all wrapped up in one pretty little project.
Why do I call it "Golden Lines" though?  Well, "copywork" sounds Awfully Boring!  Who wants to do that?!  But I came across the name "Golden Lines" in The Brave Writer guide and thought it was a great idea!  I stopped calling it Copywork and started using the new term this week and I must say that my 9 year old is much happier adding "Golden Lines" to her notebook than she was about doing "Copywork".  Sometimes motivating a child can be as simple as changing our terms!  :)  LOVE when that happens!
Best of all, I told her that when she is reading independently (either her fun reads or her assigned reading), she can feel free to add any Golden Lines she wants to her notebook.  If she finds a great moral lesson or something that just strikes her as "Wow!  That was a really great description", etc...she can add it to her book.  She liked that idea too!
My plan is to continue doing this for each book we read...I simply use a pencil to mark the margin of any GREAT passage we come across, and we discuss it right then.  Then that same day, I type any/all that we found and give them to my children.  My youngest two use the short sentences for their copywork.  My 9-year-old can either copy all that we found or I may narrow it down to one or two passages (depending on how many we find).  And, because I think dictation is a long-lost art, I use the short sentences for dictation practice for her, and the longer ones for copywork.
I can't say enough about how much depth this has added to our homeschool time.  I have seen such an improvement in my daughter's writing that I know it's worth the time and effort, and since we're using books that we're reading already, I don't really need to buy any more programs!
I did buy Writing with Ease already for them and we had been using it for all of our copywork, but I have found that it's better for us to do mostly our own passages.  I do however love using WWE for our narration work and for getting the kids hooked on specific books that I think they will enjoy.  We skip through our WWE workbooks and I only use the ones that I think they will enjoy reading the whole book later.
And, best of all, the work that I pick for my eldest daughter all gets saved in a binder, so that when my younger children read through the books that she is reading independently this year, all I have to do is pull out the page for them!  :)