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My 7yo will be doing Beyond in the fall. He has always been a good speller, and I have called out the Spelling List 2 and he only missed 3-4 words... but then corrected himself. I have thought about Rod and Staff Spelling for this year, but it honestly looks too simple, and I am not sure I want a workbook spelling anyway. I do, however, want him to understand the rules of spelling. Should I start dictation with him already? I have the Preparing guide and I thought about starting him on Level 1 dictation. Any suggestions would be appreciated!

Absolutely give prepared dictation a go. Just start out slow, have him practice more difficult words throughout the week using the fun ideas Carries suggests in the Beyond guide. My son LOVED spelling his words out in glue on cardboard scraps. With practicing the difficult words he will be sett to greater success come dictation day, Kwim?

My concerns with starting dictation are two-fold. First, if he is in Beyond, he may not have had any grammar instruction yet. Since dictation includes grammar with spelling, that might be an issue (you are supposed to have correct grammar AND spelling). Second, dictation is more writing than spelling. You might need to consider if the additional handwriting is useful at this point. Personally, I would look at spelling lists online, especially sight word lists that don't "follow the rules," and see if you can come up with 300 or so words for the year. It is 10 words a week if you follow the Beyond instructions plus a few weeks of review. Even if you can only find 100-200 words, you can do that until later in Beyond when he has learned the basic grammar at least.

Technically you are not giving direct grammar instruction but they certainly absorb what a well written sentence looks like. Charlotte Mason never taught grammar until a child was 10, when they could really make connections to that abstract thought. That is why she used dictation for spelling once a child was unlocking how to read. It exposed them to spelling words in the correct context as a-posed to a random list. Modern school guidelines in most places require grammar to be taught every year. But I once heard it said that it should not take 12 years to learn 8 parts of speech, Ha! Anyways, spelling is the focus, and if they need to get the spelling correct and you dictate to them at whatever speed they need, you should not run into grammatical issues but be building up their exposure to good writing. Similar to the benefits of copy work. That is how I understand it and have found it to work.

I don't think dictation is about writing. Not like copywork. It is about looking at a passage and visualizing the spelling and grammar from it. Spelling is the intent of dictation. It is so that there is carryover from writing in something more than a list. Most kids can memorize a list of spelling words and ace a spelling test but it actually has no carryover to their written work. Dictation seems to carry over proper spelling to written writing. So I would definitely just move on to dictation if my child was through the 2 sets of spelling lists that HOD uses. My son is a pretty natural speller and I plan to go through the lists with him prior to school starting as well and if he only missed a few like your son, then we would move to dictation.

I guess my point was that CM didn't suggest dictation until handwriting and copywork was mastered. They should be able to write neatly without any issues BEFORE starting dictation. As for grammar, I was thinking the VERY basics - capital at the beginning, period, question mark, or exclamation point at the end. Without those two rules, I bet there would be a lot of errors by a child younger than 8. Most kids younger than 8 don't totally understand that using capitals randomly is wrong. They don't understand that case is important. This is where copywork does help. Now, all kids are different. So, maybe this isn't an issue for all kids. But my daughter rarely has issues with copywork it terms of spelling. But, the capitals and punctuation are often not perfect. We are working on that in copywork. I wouldn't want to start dictation until she masters copying correctly. Does that make sense?

Yes, that does make more sense. I was assuming the child has enough skill in penmanship to handle dictation.