McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling-Book, Revised Edition · Lesson 123 · Part 5: Longer words and special spellings
123. Synthetic and dictation exercises
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
“Synthetic and Dictation Exercises.” Word pairs with meanings, then a paragraph of sentences.
The lesson, step by step
Talk about the tricky words
Pairs of words that sound alike or nearly alike, with meanings (metal and mettle, lesson and lessen, vice and vise), then sentences that use them.
The word pairs in this lesson include:
metal, mettle
lesson, lessen
vice, vise
wail, wale
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:
Filled with choler, he seized the youth by the collar.
The priest filled the censer.
He is a censor of the press.
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.