I’d use this with a student somewhere from 7-8, depending on their reading level. Click to enlarge to full size. Set your margins to .5, paper orientation to landscape.
If you print the one above with your paper on portrait orientation, you should have a lot of room at the bottom for your child to draw his own illustration.
Read it over together once, with expression.
To get the full benefit of copywork, it needs to be done word by word rather than letter by letter. To help your child do this, cover the words with stick it notes. Have them remove just enough of the paper to look at one word at a time. Instead of copying letter by letter, have them look at the whole word until they are sure they have it, then cover the word up again while they write from memory. This helps with spelling later.
If they need help with spacing, I always told my children to put the left index finger on the paper at the end of each word, and start the next word just to the right of that. I put more spaces than usual between the words to give young writers more room for their letters.
It also helps to set the timer for ten minutes, or fifteen. They can stop when the timer goes off, and pick it up again the next day. This way, the amount of work they cover naturally increases naturally as their ability to do more work grows.
As they increase in confidence, uncover two words at a time, then three.
Once they’ve finished, they can uncover everything and go over it, correcting for punctuation, spelling, and capitalization.
More copywork pages:
From Five Little Peppers and How They Grew:
Here– along with some tips and hints on how to do copywork in general, especially with beginners.
and here.
Selections from Aesop’s:
When you live somewhere with standardized testing required, and you want to work on specific grammar or punctuation issues, but you don’t want to sacrifice Miss Mason’s approach entirely… try this approach.