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I will be doing Preparing with my 10 y/o son next year. I have been looking at the guide and have a question about dictation. Do I start with Level 2 since he hasn't had any practice with studied dictation. Those look pretty easy for him, but it might be a good thing to start out easy since it will be his first year homeschooling. He also will most likely type his dictation on most days due to his fine motor issues due to his Cerebral Palsy.

Hi there-
There's no need to begin at the beginning, if his skills are more advanced. Begin him at the level where he will succeed, but be challenged. If level 2 looks pretty easy then look at level 3. If level 3 looks too difficult then go back to Level 2, but start mid--way through. He should be challenged by a new word or two, enough that it is interesting but still capable of mastery in a timely manner. If it takes him days to master a passage then the level is too challenging. You may even place him in Level 4. The higher levels of dictation will be in the CTC guide. Hope that helps!

Thanks for you answer. That is what I was thinking I should do, but I wanted to make sure. I am curious to see how he does with the dictation. He struggles with remembering to put proper punctuation on sentences and to capitalize so I think it will be very good for him.

We are doing Bigger and the passages (which are level 2 I think) look a bit easy for my son, yet he still makes capitalization and puntuation mistakes. So we are just working our way through them from the beginning. We're about 1/2 way through them now, sometimes he gets them right the first day, sometimes it takes 2 or 3 days. If you do the extra words with each passage, it seems challenging enough.