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I know we discussed this before, but I just want to clarify. My ds will have this passage from the Star Spangled Banner coming up in his dictation and it is formatted a little oddly. I noticed in the notebooking pages it is not formatted this way so I am wondering if my ds needs to write it this way when he does dictation. This is how it is written for dictation:
O, say, can you see, by the dawn's early
light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's
last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars,
through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched, were so
gallantly streaming?


I think it will be tough for him to remember all the commas as will as which words go on the separate lines, since it doesn't follow a logical pattern and I don't want to make him do this if it isn't necessary.

If you go to the original poem, it's printed like this:
O, say, can you see, by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?

We're only on dictation level 2, but my guess is that when the passage was put into columns in the manual, it made the lines come out like you posted.

Lynn,

With poetry in dictation, or with any dictation passage, I don't worry about my boys having the same number of words on each line as the passage in the guide. I just worry about the punctuation, capitalization, and spelling being the same as that in the guide.

This is because the formatting for the passages in the guide is dependent on space, and so is the child's writing. Different kiddos can fit more words on a line than other kiddos, simply due to the size of their writing. Also, not having the same number of words on a line as the guide is not technically an error (i.e. like the error of omitting a punctuation mark, or capital letter, or spelling a word in wrong).

Blessings,
Carrie