McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling-Book, Revised Edition · Lesson 62 · Part 4: Sound-alikes, accent and dictation

62. Dictation: sound-alike words

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 paragraph of sentences, no word list.

Talk about the tricky words
Sentences built around sound-alike words from the lists: dost and dust, hire and higher, whoop and hoop, mower and more.
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:
Dost consider that dust thou art?
He paid the servant his hire, and the wages were higher than last year.
The mower will cut more grass to-morrow.
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.

“Dost” and “thou art” are old ways of saying “do you” and “you are.” Explain them, then dictate the sentence anyway.

Mark this lesson done