ULW and Spelling Wisdom – Are we doing dictation right?

Hi Vicky, Thank you for reaching out with your questions!

1. You will see in the structured lessons in “Using Language Well” prompts to specifically look at and use some new punctuation as these marks are introduced (e.g. the use of quotation marks). For the studied dictation portion of the lesson, SCM recommends that your student study the punctuation for the part of the passage that you will be using for dictation. We have guidelines for how much of the passage to use for dictation by grade level at this link. You will notice you will assign your student more than you will actually use for the dictation exercise. Of course, we would recommend that you tailor this to your individual student’s needs and readiness and adjust this as needed. https://simplycharlottemason.com/blog/how-to-do-dictation/

2. For spelling, SCM recommends that you have your student study 3-4 unknown words for a passage. This may mean that you will not be able to assign up to the recommended amount by grade level at the link above, that is ok! The goal with spelling is that we see steady improvement over time. English has a lot of rules and exceptions to those rules, so we do not expect that we can teach our students to accurately spell every word in the English language. “Spelling Wisdom” does have a list of words and where they occur in the index in the back of the book. This can help you in looking for some of those words you know your student has studied in the past and noting their improvement over time. The idea with this approach is also that the student is seeing the words correctly spelled and adding those to their mental storehouse of words. We are teaching them to notice the spelling of the words as they read and seeing these words in context should help them to transfer this skill over to their writing better than with using an isolated spelling list. Keeping a list for yourself of words that your student has studied can help you to keep track and observe if you are starting to see the carryover in his spelling skill. It is a lot harder to formulate written work and spell words accurately than to spell correctly after studying for prepared dictation, so this may take some time, but you should start to see this improvement in spelling and can use the rubrics in the back of the teacher guide for “Using Language Well” with your student to help encourage them to start to focus on spelling in their written work as they’re ready as well. This blogpost expands on these ideas and has some other helpful blogposts on teaching spelling using this approach.

https://simplycharlottemason.com/blog/growth-in-spelling-the-power-of-dictation-part-2/

One more thing to add, depending on grade level, SCM recommends 15 minutes twice per week spent using these resources for grammar/spelling (I’m assuming here that your student is in 6th grade if they’re at the end of book 2 in this series). Here is a link to the grade level recommendations. If you find your student needs more time to complete the lessons, study the 3-4 words, and complete the dictation exercise, perhaps consider splitting the lesson across multiple sessions. Often looking at the number of spelling words and the length of the passage assigned to study can help to shorten the lesson length to within these recommendations. https://simplycharlottemason.com/planning/curriculum-guide/6th-grade-homeschool/

You are so welcome and I am so happy to hear that this has been helpful to you! I did just edit my response to include a link to SCM’s Individual Student Lessons pages. These pages have example schedules and recommendations as far as lesson duration and frequency. I just wanted to make sure you saw those as I think you may have commented before I did so and my screen had just not refreshed!

Hi Vicky,

Great questions! SCM recommends that students start to read some of the grade level books for science and history in around fourth grade (the exact timing of this and how much will depend on your individual student). This and the written narrations will be scheduled into the time spent for those subjects. The schedules on the individual student lessons pages focus on the individual skill based subjects including: language arts, math, and science. The schedule you see for science would include the assigned reading and then a written narration if you assign one for that reading. You will see a note under “Narration” on the individual student lessons page as far as how many written narrations to assign your student each week based on their grade level. If you choose to assign a narration for history then you would prompt your student to do so after that lesson. I see your point as reading and writing are individual skill based subjects but once a student advances to this level, we start to use those skills within other subjects so that is why it is not reflected separately on that schedule.

This schedule includes those other subjects and has a note for the individual student lessons, however it directs you to refer to the other schedules I linked before for more details. https://simplycharlottemason.com/planning/curriculum-guide/