School Dictation

During my first year of homeschooling, I became a big fan of copywork and dictation for teaching language arts. Sparkle constantly amazes me with her grasp of English, and copywork and dictation are wonderfully easy to adapt to whatever she needs work on.

I actually stumbled upon copywork and dictation before becoming a fan of Charlotte Mason. When we started a formal spelling program, sentence dictation was my primary method of practicing and testing spelling words. Then it became a natural method to teach about capitalization, punctuation, and grammar. Susan C. Anthony's website inspired me to do short dictations every day. As Sparkle's abilities grew, we gradually moved to longer dictations, and then from multiple unrelated sentences to short paragraphs.

I've gradually refined my method for doing dictation over the past year. (Unlike Charlotte Mason, I prefer cold dictation to studied dictation.) Here is what it currently looks like. (I'm recording it now, because it will likely be totally different in another year.)

The first time I read the dictation passage, I have Sparkle just listen for meaning. Then I check if she understands it. If she doesn't understand a part or is just curious about something, we discuss it. For example, if she's wondering why a character does a particular thing, that makes it hard for her to think about what the exact words are, so we get that out of the way first.

Then I read the dictation again and have her concentrate on remembering the exact words. Then I have her repeat back as much as she can remember. If she can't remember at least the first phrase, I re-read until she can, possibly reading a shorter portion of the passage.

Once she can remember at least the first phrase, I have her start writing. When she can't remember what comes next, I have her re-read what she's written. Often that will jog her memory. If it doesn't, I continue reading the dictation where she leaves off.

If a dictation contains words that I know she can't spell, I write those on a scratch piece of paper for her to refer to when she gets to them.

After Sparkle is done writing, I re-read the dictation a final time, for her to check her work and make any last minute corrections. Only then do I check her work.

I have Sparkle write on every other line, and she isn't allowed to use her eraser to correct mistakes larger than a single letter. If she needs to correct a word or more, she draws a single line through whatever is incorrect and writes the correction in an empty line.

I currently create her dictations from her spelling words, but I'm about to change all that. Sparkle has so many spelling words each day that it is too hard to come up with daily paragraphs that use all of them. However, the benefits of paragraph dictation have been so overwhelming that I don't want to give it up. So, I'm thinking of using dictation passages from regular books.