Spelling Wisdom and working full-time?

A few suggestions, Cindy.

1.  The most time consuming feature of prepared dictation is the PREPARING.  They could do that during the day.  I never do a dictation lesson longer than fifteen minutes, so you could probably squeeze in a fifteen minute lesson.  I typically do prepared dictation twice a week.

2.  Alternatively, you could use your technical prowess 🙂  and record an audio file for them to use of you reading the selection slowly, while they do the dictation.  You’d have to trust them not to replay it five times 🙂 and you wouldn’t have the advantage of being right there to correct it on the spot if they misspell or make an error, but you could probably find a way to make it work if you just couldn’t find the time in the evenings. 

HTH!

Well, I don’t know for sure if I do it exactly like Sonya, I don’t have that video and was doing dictation for quite a while before I “met” her.  But I do it quite differently with the teens than I do with the younger child.  The teens really just read over the passage, look up words they don’t know and find where they came from, list words they might have trouble spelling, and look for unusual punctuation.  They’ve been at this a while, and in fact they don’t often encounter words they can’t spell and they are quite good at basic punctuation.  The 10yo has a little more work to do.  With him, we diagram the sentence or break it up into clauses, discuss ALL the punctuation, make a list of words to practice on spelling, and look up definitions he doesn’t know.  So you might need to figure out what you want them to do, and then they can do it, perhaps?  Perhaps leave an annotated copy of the passage, having them look up words, diagram the sentence, list spelling words to work on using whatever method you use, or whatever else your boys need done?  Once they’ve been at it a while, they probably won’t need as much input from you to tackle a passage.