Kindergarten Dictation Week 7

[Angela]

We are on Friday's plans of week 7 and the phonics includes dictating simple sentences that include words with the letter Pp. I'm just surprised because this seems quite a jump from anything we've done so far. There has only been one simple dictation exercise so far and that was with isolated words, not entire sentences. Also, I'm not sure where we're supposed to do this exercise since the Dictation pages in the back of FSR A seem to be for future exercises.

How should I approach this with my son today? I think he could do one word at a time but not an entire sentence.

[Michelle T]

Re: Kindergarten Dictation Week 7

Angela,

The exercise of dictation is a challenging one. You are at the point in the year where we begin working on a complete sentence. In my class we only did two sentences at this point. They were simple 3 or 4 word sentences dictated one word at a time, and were completed on a white board. We are teaching HOW to write a sentence. First I told the class we were going to write a whole sentence. Next I explained that every sentence begins with an uppercase letter. Then I would read the whole sentence twice. Let's use "Pam pats the pig." as our example. Next I would say the first word of our sentence is Pam, pppp-aaa-mmm. Be sure to over enunciate each sound. Then I would ask "Did you remember to use an uppercase p?" Those who didn't were instructed to "fix" their word- I would point to the P alphabet card to remind them what an uppercase P looks like.

After the first word I would talk about grouping letters within words together but putting a space between words so our sentence doesn't look like one long word. Sometimes I wrote a sentence without spaces as an example. So I would instruct students to put a finger space between their words and model how to do this. Then I would say the sentence again and dictate the next word pats pppp-aaa-ttt-sss. Since this word has an s at the end we would talk about how the word is used in the sentence to see if it should be possessive or plural. We would talk about the difference. I would even demonstrate "pats" by patting a student on the head and saying "Mrs. Tefertiller pats Matthew on the head." After they have the letters down talk about spacing between words again and go to the next word.

After each word had been dictated I discussed the three end marks. For this I would put an example of a sentence with each end mark on the board and read them so the student can hear the difference in inflection for each. I would really stress the way I read dictation sentences all year so there was no doubt as to which end mark was needed.

Take time for this. It is really a learning activity so allow your student to make corrections. If they put the wrong end mark, ask them to listen to you read the sentence again. The same is true if he misspells a word. Point to the wrong word and enunciate the sounds again. We are in the learning stage of the process most all year. So don't put too much pressure on yourself especially for these initial lessons.

As you can see this activity teaches many things, capitalization, punctuation, grammar, and encoding just to name a few!

Hope this is helpful and you have a successful FSR lesson today!


Blessings,
Michelle T

[Angela]

Re: Kindergarten Dictation Week 7

Thanks, Michelle! I kept referring to your post while we did it and it went great. Thanks for the detailed instructions! I might have been tempted to skip over that assignment and I'm so glad that we took the time to do it. I was surprised by how well he took to it and he was very proud of himself.

[Michelle T]

Re: Kindergarten Dictation Week 7

Glad it went well! Don't be surprised if you have to repeat similar instructions in future dictations. Even on the last one of the year I reiterate, "How does a good sentence need to begin?" and, "How do we know the sentence is finished?"

Blessings,
Michelle T