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I have a 14 year old daughter who will be starting WG this year. This will be our first year with HOD, and she has not done dictation in the past. She has a lot of difficulty with spelling. Any hints on how to work with that and dictation? Also, I thought about starting with the dictation Level 5 from my son's book. She has no problem remembering what she hears. In fact, she has freakishly amazing recall. She is just a very poor speller. I thought about having her write out a couple of the difficult words to use as a "cheat sheet" during dictation. Does that totally defeat the purpose?

The point of dictation is to teach her to see and retain the correct spelling in her head so yes having a cheat sheet defeats the purpose. Have her write any challenging words on a whiteboard or piece of paper as she studies them. Then erase the whiteboard before you dictate a phrase at a time. She has to get all punctuation, indenting and capitalization correct as well as spelling. If she misses anything she refoes it the next day. Go back in level as far as you need to in order to get where she doesn't have to repeat more than 1 or 2 passages a week.

My 14 year old daughter does not have huge problems with spelling and I started her on Level 4 dictation. She hates it and was upset yesterday when she spelled one of the words wrong. She is in RtR this year.

Wendy with your daughter's learning disabilities I am sure dictation is challenging, but since the passages are short it might be just the thing to teach her to keep a visual in her brain. This might carry over to other subjects such as oral or written narration where she has to hold a visual in her brain, so even though she doesn't like doing it I would keep at it. Of course you know her best and know if it will be too frustrating for her.

Lynn - I plan to keep doing it with her. She does have a very good memory for things like memory verses. Sometimes it works better to let her read things multiple times and then she will remember them better. That is what we did with science and history the last few years (no worksheets/tests, just reading things multiple times). I wanted her to do more than that this year. Part of her problem is that she is also a perfectionist and it is very hard on her to get things wrong.