Dictation

Here's a video of Sparkle doing her dictation for school.
I left Sparkle alone for the most part, and didn't realize all the antics she was doing until after I watched the video.



Remarks:

Sparkle likes to have a snack when she does dictation. As long as the food doesn't distract her from her assignment, I let her nibble. Glitter is off camera also enjoying snack of craisons.

I pre-record a week or more of dictation on my iPhone. Sparkle can play, pause, and rewind the recording as much as she needs in order to get the dictation word perfect. She determines how long a phrase to remember at a time.

I am experimenting with giving Sparkle passages that have more complex punctuation than I've taught her. Thus, I say all the punctuation aloud. Eventually, I will gradually phase out the spoken punctuation.

This dictation doubles as spelling. Sparkle generally makes few spelling errors. Notice that she asks me how to spell one word in the middle of the passage, and then changes her mind. If she sounds out the word and gets it right, she doesn't have to practice the word at the end. If she has me spell the word for her, or if she guesses wrong, she has to practice that word three times at the end.

Before I see the paper, Sparkle is free to make any corrections herself. Once she is done, I mark any additional corrections myself and explain the correction to her. Sparkle is a bit of a perfectionist, so simply seeing my markups is incentive enough for her to try to get it right next time. I have her write double-spaced so that there is plenty of room for corrections.

The dictation is a story taken from a public domain reading textbook. I got the idea of using an ongoing story from Jane Bell Kiester's "Caught'ya! Grammar with a Giggle" book. Sparkle likes to re-read earlier parts of the story before starting her dictation.