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My daughter, 8, is in Bigger this year. She has been in HOD since the beginning of school. She thinks dictation is super easy and is begging to do dictation that is a lot harder. This is her first year doing dictation, and she is on passage 32 and has not made a single mistake yet this year. I'm not sure if I should move her (to the next dictation level) or if I should skip ahead to a later passage...or if we should just keep trucking along. She really is a phenomenal speller, writer, and reader. In fact, she's quite a bit ahead of what my other kids were at her age. I don't want her to be bored or not challenged, but I also don't want to "harm" her by moving her ahead and skipping over something if there's a purpose in the progression of the passages. Thanks for your advice!

What we did when my late reading DD was finally ready to start dictation (she'd done some before, pre-HOD, then we took time off of LA just to concentrate on Brain Training and were jumping mid-year into HOD's LA, so starting at the beginning really was too easy) was to do just the top two passages from each page. We kept going along the top passage of each column until she started needing more than one day to do a passage. We ended up slowing down part way through a level so I think this worked really well, since she was then at a place that challenged her but didn't overwhelm her by jumping too far (ie to the next level).

Some things to remember:
1) don't stop the first time she needs 2 days for a passage - we all make mistakes!
2) don't wait until she needs 2-3 days for even most passages, either. You want to find a happy medium where she is challenged but doesn't get frustrated.
3) dictate complete sentences, not just phrases. You may find that she has to slow down simply because sentence length outstrips her memory, rather than her finding a challenge with spelling!

Blessings,

Thanks! I will try that!