heartofdakota.com

What do you do when they fly through dictation passages and then get to one where they are just stuck? Jayden got to 50 with no issues at all... maybe the random missing punctuation or capitalization. But nothing that she didn't catch on the checking and nothing that didn't get fixed the next time easily. But she has been on number 50 for 4 times now. OF course I type this and she'll get it right today, but in the future what do I do? Just keep doing the same one until she gets it right? Give it a certain number of tries and then move on? What do we do when she gets stuck?

My oldest had this happen once. It was so frustrating to both of us for a while, but we kept on the same one. I think she developed a mental block or something after the 4th time . We got through our frustration though, and it actually started being funny (well, not really funny, but we could laugh at it). What we did after about the 5th time I think was to just take a break with dictation for a few days (maybe 4-5 days). We didn't skip it, we just didn't do dictation at all for that week. Then when she tried it again, she got it right the first day back. We both did a happy dance (literally ) when she got it right.

The funny thing was, after she made it past that one, she didn't make one single error for at least the next 10 passages or so.

Hang in there! She'll get it!
Angie

Well, just like I said, she got it right this time.

I just wanted to be sure I was doing it right... and that it was normal I mean, like literally no mistakes for 20 passages, and then this one hit and she just could not get it right. Thanks for the reassurance and advice!

that's what we do-just don't do dictation for a couple days.
I have also gone back to one of the passages that they did well on, so they can regain that sense of mastery.