Dictation Questions

[mammabear5]

I am using Bigger with my 8 year old 3rd grader. We are doing the dictation passages, which I have found to be very easy for her. She literally looks at the passage for less than a minute and then has no mistakes when she writes it. I am wondering what the objectives of the dictation are and what skills it is supposed to teach. Would it be better for her if I get a spelling program that is more challenging for her?

Thanks

[Kathleen]

This was exactly where we were last year. I continued on with the dictation in Bigger, but it probably would have been more of a challenge for my son if I'd purchased the Preparing guide to use the next dictation level. Dictation is practice spelling words correctly along with capitalizing and punctuating correctly. I figured that even if he got all of them correct the 1st time (which he didn't as we moved along), it was still great practice writing things correctly. And, the whole point of studied dictation is to write it correctly and see it the right way. So, if she's doing it right, you're accomplishing that.

I really don't feel that it was a waste of time for us last year even though it wasn't particularly challenging for Grant. So, what I did in your shoes was just keep going with it. This year as we've moved on to level 3, he still rarely has to repeat a passage but I can see that they're getting to be more of a challenge. And I think that's the way it's "supposed" to be - that they don't have to repeat very many passages.

Personally I think writing correctly in context (the way dictation does it) will be a way better learning experience than to master a list of more difficult words that you study just to test.

I don't know if my opinions are helpful for you or not, but those are the things I considered while making the same decision last year.
Kathleen

[allforjesus]

Are you supposed to let them look at it, then they start writing it? I'm wondering if I'm doing dictation wrong. The first day, I have my son copy it out of the book. The second day, I read it to him and he writes it. If it's all correct in spelling and punctuation and capitalization, then we move on next time. If something is wrong, he corrects it, studies it, rewrites mispellings, etc. Next time I would again read it and he writes it. Do any of you do dictation differently? Now I'm curious if I'm doing it right.

[Kathleen]

SueAnn,

There are directions on how to do dictation in the appendix right before the 1st dictation passage. They're spelled out very clearly. (Much better than I could do here, I'm sure.) That's where I learned last year in Bigger. But here's a quick run-down of what we do. (And it only takes about 5-7 min)

*Grant studies the passage - looking for capitalization, punctuation, any words he might want to think about how to spell
*He grabs his notebook
*I dictate the 1st phrase (whole sentence if it's not too long)
*He repeats it back to me verbally and then writes it
*He says "Ready!" and I dictate next phrase
*Repeat this process until done

When we did the ones in Bigger last year, I would give him 2 or 3 of the words atthe bottom at a time. We're on the next level in Preparing this year and usually 3 phrases gets the whole passage done for us.

*Grant reads over what he wrote to make sure he didn't make any careless mistakes.
*Grant takes the original and check his against it, correcting any mistakes in his writing right away and circling the mistakes in the original
*If it's ok, he puts a check mark next to it
*The next day, we either repeat the last passage or move onto the next one.

Kathleen

[my3sons]

Hi Sue Ann? How's it going? It sounds like your little guy is having a good year. Our dictation story is pretty much identical to Kathleen's. Wyatt rarely missed anything in his dictation when we first began. We continued on with it anyway, and I'm personally glad we did. Wyatt is now doing Level 4 dictation, and it's hard. He is missing something about every other day. I'm glad we didn't rush our way to it. His spelling within his own writing has grown leaps and bounds since beginning dictation. Even when doing his written narrations and using longer more difficult to spell words, he usually only misses a few. Doing dictation has done more for my son's spelling than anything else out there. Kathleen did a super job of going through the steps of dictation - you can also read them at the beginning of the dictation passages in the Appendix. Just stopping the copying of the dictation on the first day will move your ds through the dictation much more quickly, and I would guess as he goes further and further into the dictation, he'll begin missing things. I'm a big believer in dictation now, but it took me many years to get here. Writing in context has been so much more effective than studying a list of spelling words (and believe me, I had YEARS of doing that being a former Spelling Power user). Anyway, I'd encourage you to keep going through it, and if you get through it more quickly than the end of the year, you can always get the PHFHG guide and start him on the next level.

In Christ,
Julie

[Carrie]

mamabear5,

The ladies have done a terrific job of helping you! My sons also are thriving with dictation, and I will admit that my second son rarely if ever misses a passage. He's currently in Level 4 and is just a natural speller. Some kiddos are natural spellers, and what a blessing that is! By the time you get to levels 4-5, the passages do get quite a bit harder. So, it's good to make sure your daughter has a strong foundation in dictation by the time she gets there.

If you do feel that she needs a jump up, you could easily move to the middle of the passages within Bigger Heart or even toward the last quarter of the passages. Then, when you finish the passages early you could get the Preparing Hearts guide for the next level of passages (as it contains levels 2, 3, and 4). Or, if you didn't desire to purchase the Preparing Hearts guide until the next year, you could instead finish out the year doing studied dictation using passages from the literature your daughter is reading (CM-style). Here's a link to explain how to do that. Just scroll down the thread to see my posts on it.
Link: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=925

Blessings,
Carrie

[kiloyd]

Thank you for this post! It helped me understand dictation better. My ds also rarely makes a mistake.

I've been wondering if it's time to have him not look at it and just write it from me saying it?

Katherine
ds8 bigger
dd newly 5 LHTH
dd2

[my3sons]

Thank you for this post! It helped me understand dictation better. My ds also rarely makes a mistake.

I've been wondering if it's time to have him not look at it and just write it from me saying it?

Katherine
ds8 bigger
dd newly 5 LHTH
dd2

Looking at the passage and studying it is part of the process of committing the words to memory. The brain is like a camera snapping a "picture" of the words and eventually storing the "picture" so that it can recognize when the word "looks right" and when it doesn't. This is why when we don't know how to spell something, we generally jot it down on paper and look at it, to see if it "looks right". Sometimes we try writing it several different ways, but usually we can tell which of the ones we wrote "looks right" if we've seen the word written correctly enough times. This is also why it's important the brain does not continually see a word spelled wrong over and over, because then that misspelling begins to "look right" to our brain, simply because we've seen it that way so many times. CM methods have a child immediately correct misspellings, erasing them and fixing them as soon as possible by looking at a model of the word properly spelled, thus hopefully effectively erasing the memory of the misspelling from the brain before it is committed to memory. For these reasons, in lieu of skipping the studying part of the dictation, you may just want to skip ahead to harder dictation passages (maybe 20 passages ahead or so), and see how that goes.

In Christ,
Julie