Really, the hard thing right now is teaching Josie How To Talk To Others Nicely When We Don't Feel Like It. She screams a lot even though she knows how to say, "please stop" and "please don't" &c. It is an inconvenient thing to have to deal with. God give me strength.
But today I want to talk about Dictation. It was one of the most important things I read about in CM's Vol. 1 last fall. I knew that Dictation was in our future, but hadn't really looked into it yet. It was divine timing to read that section of the book, and to be asked by Joel for help with his spelling right about the same time. Now, he is by no means a terrible speller, but he did and does a typical thing CM talks about which results in poor spelling.
"Illiterate spelling is usually a sign of ...
hasty reading without the habit of
seeing the words that are skimmed over."
This is exactly what he does. He reads quite well, and quickly, too. But he doesn't pay attention to how words are spelled while he's reading. He just doesn't. This has to change, so I began doing Dictation with Joel in the fall. I proceeded to make him hate it. I knew that it was supposed to work, but felt like something must be getting lost in translation - either between CM's writings and myself, or between myself and Joel, or between what was in my head and what I was actually doing. I read more CM blogs, I even bought a special white-out pen and red pen for Joel like Linda Fay does with her students. He and I both were frustrated because he just was not remembering how to spell the words. I went to the AO Forum for help and found some from an AO Auxiliary member. She wrote about spending more time with the dictation passage - for a week, in fact, and not just one day. That was a new idea, and it made perfect sense for Joel. So that is what we began doing. Guess what? Joel likes dictation now. Amazing. And his spelling is improving dramatically. Most importantly, he doesn't feel like he is a moron because he doesn't know how to spell things. He knows that he can and is learning to spell. We copy out the dictation passage each day, and we talk about the words. It could almost be called a "learning to pay attention to how words are spelled" lesson. That's really what it is. And since he is learning to pay attention to spelling, he is learning how to spell.
I also found an ebook, which is everything I have been doing, plus more. It's called Simply Spelling by Laurie Hicks. This is what I love about this book:
It's CM through and through. She tells the student "teach yourself to spell".
She uses a lot of Mother Goose rhymes for dictation passages.
She has tips for the teacher, which are simply practical suggestions for applying principles.
The book is telling Joel what to do instead of me, but it is saying exactly what I would have said. Only, he doesn't know that. And if you tell him that little secret, I will hurt you. :)
This book was not the key to our success, we have only done one lesson in it. It is simply saving me time and effort. Joel thinks that the word scrambler game on my mom's phone is what really got him into learning how to spell, but I know better....
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