McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling-Book, Revised Edition · Lesson 104 · Part 5: Longer words and special spellings
104. Dictation: accept and except
Goal: Your child writes the book's sentences from dictation with correct spelling, capitals and punctuation.
You'll need
- The book page for this lesson
- A slate, small whiteboard, or paper and pencil
What's in the book
“Dictation Exercises.” A paragraph of sentences.
The lesson, step by step
Talk about the tricky words
Sentences that use pairs of words that sound nearly alike: accept and except, excess and access, exceed and accede.
Find these words in the sentences and talk about what each one means.
Read the sentences together
Read all the sentences aloud together. Some of them:
I accept all your presents except the last.
Though your terms exceed my expectations, I must accede to them.
The best cosmetic is air and exercise.
Ask your child to spell the tricky words in each sentence aloud before you go on.
Write from dictation
Close the book. Read one sentence at a time, slowly, in short parts. Read the whole sentence once more at the end.
Your child writes it with a capital letter at the start and the right mark at the end. Do four to six sentences.
Check and correct
Open the book and compare letter by letter, including capitals, commas and periods. For each misspelled word, your child spells it aloud and writes it correctly three times.
Quick review
Ask three or four words from the hard-words list, or from the last lesson if the list is empty. Words spelled right twice in a row can come off the list.
Afterwards
Dictate the remaining sentences of this lesson tomorrow.
Tip
Accept and except are still mixed up by grown-ups. A memory trick: except starts with ex, like exit, and means “leave out.”