McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling-Book, Revised Edition · Lesson 26 · Part 2: The many sounds of each vowel

26. First dictation exercise

Goal: Your child writes the book's sentences from dictation with correct spelling, capitals and punctuation.

⏱ About 15 minutes · 5 steps

You'll need

“Dictation Exercises.” A note to the teacher, then a block of sentences. There is no word list.

Talk about the tricky words
The book's first dictation lesson. The sentences use words that sound alike but are spelled differently, like eight and ate, pale and pail.
The book puts it this way:
These lessons are intended as exercises in the meaning as well as the spelling of words.
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:
He ate seven or eight apples.
Send the pale maid with the pail of milk.
Age gives edge to wine.
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.

Dictate the remaining sentences of this lesson tomorrow.

Mark this lesson done