dictation...getting them correct

[annaz]

For Bigger, if dd gets the dictation correct on the first try, the next day (or next time it's scheduled), do we just move on to the next dictation blurb in the back of the book or are we done with spelling for the week? And if the answer is the first part, what do we do if you run out of dictation blurbs before we complete the year?

[StillJulie]

I move on to the next one on the next day. If you use up all in the current guide, I think the next guide would have new ones. I have all the HOD guides, so it isn't an issue for me.

[Carrie]

annaz,

Julie is right that you move on to the next passage each time your child gets a passage perfectly correct (meaning all capitalization, spelling, and punctuation correct). Dictation is scheduled within the guides 3 times weekly, and there are enough passages for the whole year for a hypothetical child who never misses a passage. So, you shouldn't run out of passages. The next guide in line will have a new set of passages for whenever you complete the current set. At our house, when we start a new school year, we just keep going with the passages wherever we left off the year before.

Blessings,
Carrie

[annaz]

Thanks Carrie. We've been doing another spelling program and I'm going to try Bigger's dictation instead. So far she's gotten them all right. But I highly doubt we'll be without error through the rest of the book. I wondered though when she sees it to study whether she knows the spelling or just has a memory of it being spelled that way at that particular time.

I thought maybe we should let dd do the passage again without study on the next day to see if she really knows the words. Is there a chance that she knows them only because she looked at them prior to the test?

[Carrie]

annaz,

This is such a good question, and one that I struggled with too until I read more about Charlotte Mason's style of studied dictation. Her emphasis within dictation is actually on the studying of the passage in order to fix it within one's mind, in essence practicing the habit of making a mental or a photographic image of the text (paying special attention to how the words are spelled, where the capital letters are found, and which punctuation marks are used where).

I found this so interesting, as in my days as a public school teacher it was that very skill that was lacking for poor spellers. They had no idea whether a word looked right or not, which is often the technique used by natural spellers to tell whether a word is spelled correctly. The poor spellers had seen the word spelled incorrectly so many times in their own writing that the wrong spelling actually looked right. It is amazing to me how many spelling programs have a section where kiddos are asked to find the incorrectly spelled word within the spelling exercises (in essence taking a mental picture of the incorrect spelling). Charlotte Mason would find this to be a poor activity, as it reinforces incorrect spelling. She was very adamant that any word spelled incorrectly be covered up and fixed immediately, so as not to fix the wrong image within the mind.

Training the mind to capture a correct image of a word, sentence, and eventually passage is a powerful tool in spelling. It is often a tool that does more for kiddos who have struggled with spelling in the past, than any amount of memorizing rules does. This was an amazing idea to me, and one that I had never heard during my years of training as a teacher, yet it makes so much sense. And, what's more it really works!I was so surprised to find that studied dictation was the method used for spelling here in America in the early 1900's.

Blessings,
Carrie

[annaz]

Carrie, very interesting. I wish you were coming to AZ. It would be interesting to see how you went from being a public school teacher, to changing to CM views. There was the post on "trust". I'm working on it. LOL!

I'm a natural speller and while I was taught rules, I don't remember using them. Even if there was a word I never heard of I could just see it. It didn't matter how big or complicated it was. I just knew how it looked in my head.

Thanks,
Ann