Early Elementary Dictation

What does early dictation look like? Here is a current snapshot of dictation with my two youngest students.

We practice dictation 3 days a week, usually M/W/F. I work with each child to choose a sentence from a book they are reading.  They have a moment to study it, then we dictate.  The kids love using dry erase for this. I don’t know why, but it works!

Step 1:  Dictate the sentence.  After they complete their best work, I give them the book to proofread the sentence.  We talk about errors.  In the picture below (8 year old boy), we discussed the use of capital letters.

Step 2: Quick grammar lesson.  We start with “circle the nouns” and move through the parts of speech slowly, over a year or two, depending on aptitude.  The picture below is my 10 year old daughter.  She can identify all 8 parts of speech, with the exception of some tricky adverbs.  However, her handwriting skills have been slow to develop, so she is still doing very short sentences.

I keep Grammar Concept checklists for each child to remind me which concepts they might need to learn next.  I will often guide them to a sentence that suits the checklist.

If you don’t like the idea of choosing sentences from a book, I have some links to sentences on my main Dictation page.