Dictation
I wondered how we'd go with dictation that included complete,
longer and more
involved, sentences.
Thanks to Christie, author of Just Us blog,
and her post here, I went tripping and traipsing around through the
Peace Hill Press site, then over to you tube, read back through what Charlotte Mason had to
say about dictation (
found from pg 241 on - or in Home Education Volume 1 - the physical book , refer to pg 24o) and came away encouraged and fortified with a few key ideas to make that next gear shift up with WWE a smoother journey - that was 4 months ago and our dictation times feel natural, not forced or stressful for either Jay or I.
(Jay's not overly fussed on being 'featured' on a blog - so I ask each time before I post. He's said "no thank you!" a time or two, so those posts don't happen. But this time we've got the green light to publish it.)
Remember we're not CM or classical purists, yet our eclectic- CM.ish-sort-of-classical blend seems to be the approach to dictation for Jay.
My mantra has long been
teach for my child not to the phylosophy and it just makes it easier for me to stop second guessing myself so much (
she says rolling her eyes).
Our warm up pieces to dictation were short n sweet and easy on purpose. I didn't want Jay giving me the possum in the head lights look.
We're working steadily through portions of
WWE 2 and the
accompanying text (that book just makes my l/a's teaching and planning life so much easier).
Adding in spelling rules we're learning with
AAS, and any grammar topics Jay is covering, to the dictation piece seems to be an obvious move to make, so I try to 'aim' at including those 2 aspects.
When we're learning a new, or extended, skill I like to have a crack at it myself first - doing dictation on longer pieces was not really that easy, well for me! It's like teaching this 'older' dog new tricks
(smile)
Jay is looking at the longer dictation pieces first, as suggested in the work book, and then we discuss anything of difference or importance before we start breaking the piece down for him to write out.
We're currently working through pieces like this:
Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit hole, and that means comfort.
Having a try at writing
that from dictation is not as easy as it may seem, yet Mrs. Bauer's methodology which is shown in '
doing dictation with Dan' gives some good pointers - I'm so glad she made
this particular video clip.
And to add some variety, and memorisation practice to our dictation, I'm giving Jay his scripture copywork from the week (
detailed in this post) as dictation at the end of the week. Works great!
During our logic years of learning we like to continue including scripture memorisation, and copywork - the extra slant is that, with the smaller pieces, once the scripture has been memorised and the copywork completed we try our hand at writing the piece as a dictation piece.
Bobs and Daisy love it when mum gets seriously organised to nail the subjects down neatly all into one short, did I mention short :), written piece.
Since this is the week that the focus for L/A's is all switched to our history topic we've pulled in the WWE style language arts pages we created (& never used) to go with our SL Core 2 book, Peter the Great.
On our customised, Story of the World 3 & Sonlight Core 3, schedule you'll find The Witch of Blackbird Pond slotted in on page 1c, SOTW3 chapter: 15.