McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling-Book, Revised Edition · Lesson 81 · Part 4: Sound-alikes, accent and dictation
81. Dictation: essay and assay, contemn and condemn
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 look or sound nearly alike: essay and assay, contemn and condemn.
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:
To essay the task, requires courage.
The discourse was an able essay.
An agent will assay the ore, and forward a receipt.
Contemn a mean act; but do not always condemn the actor.
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
Explain the hard words first: to essay is to try; to assay ore is to test it for metal; to contemn is to scorn.