How do you help your child do the longer dictations in WWE4?

[Jane Elliot]

I thought I'd get more experienced answers here, so I hope no one minds me asking this on the logic stage board.

 

I am using WWE4 with a 4th grader who has completed WWE 1-3. He really struggles to hold the longer dictation passages in his head long enough to get them on paper. I am not surprised or worried about this. He's my tenth child, and I've used WTM with all of them, so I know this is not out of the ordinary, but it does seem that some dc struggle more with this than others.

 

What has been your experience with this? What are your best tips for helping dc with the longer dictations?

 

(I'm not looking for reasons to do or not to do long dictation passages. This is a method I'm sold on. I fully understand the value of it as I've seen the results in my older children. What I'm hoping for is a discussion on tips and ideas for dictation.)

[TarynB]

Have you seen the YouTube clips of Susan Wise Bauer doing dictation from WWE4 with her son? Watching it in action helped me a lot.

 

Dictation with Dan, part 1:

 

Dictation with Dan, part 2:

[Jane Elliot]

Have you seen the YouTube clips of Susan Wise Bauer doing dictation from WWE4 with her son? Watching it in action helped me a lot.

 

Dictation with Dan, part 1:

 

Dictation with Dan, part 2:

 

Yes, this is a great idea. I have seen those, but not for quite awhile. I need to watch them again. Thanks.

[alpidarkomama]

This has been an often-revisited topic. :) *I* can't even do the dictations in WWE4! So I just parse it out as needed. DD9 is definitely better at it than I am, so we just do the best we can. I can definitely appreciate that the better they get at it, the easier the writing process will be for them so our aim is to get there, but in our own time.

[lauracolumbus]

I don't do the whole thing. I just use as much as I think she's capable of and try to stretch her and break it into 2 parts. They are exceptionally long and complicated and quite a jump from WWE3.

 

Laura

[fluffybunny]

My ds was 11 when we did WWE4 and he would get upset if I didn't stop after just 3 words. So the only way he would agree to continue with WWE4 was if I dictated slowly as he typed. He does have ADHD though.

[Pod's mum]

Not very WWE, but if I know my dd will not manage certain words (and I do not want to waste another day on her learning the passage), I will give her some 'free' words, that I will write at the top of her page.

These are automatically added to any errors that she makes and has to learn, but she will not have the incorrect spelling in her head to overcome.

 

I tend to do half sentences at a time but we are building up as her memory and spelling-stamina improves.

 

Like her mother, spelling will always be an issue, so I don't want to hold everything else back for this aspect.

[Guest tckats]

I had similar issues. I did a few things that helped. I had him read along as I say it out loud or I had him do it as copy work the day before the dictation lesson. But what worked the best was having him make a movie in his head. This went more slowly but it really broke the barrier of these longer lessons. First, while keeping his face straight ahead he would look up with just his eye to a blank wall(this engages the memory part of the brain). Then I would give bits of the sentence for him to visualize, adding bit by bit until it was all done. Sometimes the wording is awkward and he would visualize the word to help him remember. Hope this helps.

[kalanamak]

Not very WWE, but if I know my dd will not manage certain words (and I do not want to waste another day on her learning the passage), I will give her some 'free' words, that I will write at the top of her page.

 

 

 

 

Not WWE 4, but when we were doing WWE 3, I'd look ahead and any words I expected him to not get (not phonetic, etc) I would go over a day before in spelling class, and we'd discuss the exceptions/rules etc. BTW, I took one look at WWE4 and did a detour through WT, and did the copywork pages as dictation to keep his hand in, as it were.

 

ETA: We are now three dictations into WWE4.

1) words that I know will delay us (courteously) I print out before hand, and discuss.

2) I read it to him and have him raise his hand for punctuation (he loves this for some reason).

3) I discuss any pat phrases e.g. "be so kind as to".

4) Read it again in chunks and he repeats after me. I've found out any mistake he makes he tends to make over and over, so I talk about it. E.g. he says ask for request. Discuss the difference between the two, and how request fits the tone of the sentence.

5) Start out in reasonable chunks.

 

Since this tends to stress him a little, I try to make the discussions interesting, e.g. for request vs. ask I sound like the shill lady in the ad at the beginning of BBC DVDs -- "One wants one's BBC!" or when going over "be so kind as to" I use it in gruesome examples: Would you be so kind as to stomp this slug to death? Would you be so kind as to stuff this carrot in my ear?

 

So far so good, and we are happy to be back at WWE, which is more writingish than WT, which was fun for its time, but was dragging on a little much in the grammar topics.

[MomsintheGarden]

I used WWE 4 with my twins, then age 9, for the 2011-2012 school year. They hadn't done any other WWE books, but we had done lots of dictation together before. They were good spellers, and were using R&S Grammar on grade level, so I wasn't worried about mechanics. What I really wanted to work on was listening. I was determined to train them be able to listen closely enough to remember the longer passages.

 

It was a little rough going at first, but we figured out a pattern that worked. The first time through I read the passage piece by piece, to the natural breaks, by commas, phrases, or short sentences. They would repeat each piece to me until they got it right, usually once or twice. Second time was sentence by sentence with them repeating. The third time through was the whole thing, with them repeating again. They thought it was too hard at first, but I insisted that if Dr. Bauer thought they could do it, they could. After a while they realized that if they listened very, very intently, and tried hard to remember, they could do it. I would watch them carefully while they wrote and try to catch mistakes immediately.

 

Sometimes I would have to repeat the passage a fourth time - they book says that for some of the passages anyway. I was very glad I stuck with it because they both improved a lot in their listening skills.

 

Both have transitioned well to WWS 1, especially the narrations.

 

This year my third grader is doing WWS 3. I expect that he will have less trouble with WWE 4 than the twins because the passages are gradually getting longer.

[AvasMom]

Have you seen the YouTube clips of Susan Wise Bauer doing dictation from WWE4 with her son? Watching it in action helped me a lot.

 

Dictation with Dan, part 1:

 

Dictation with Dan, part 2:

 

This video left my 11 yr old ds gobsmacked. There was SO much going on with the dishes, the cabinet guy, etc and Dan just kept working. My ds was like "That kid must not have ears or something!" Ds has no comprehension of other kids not being as distractable as him. Lol!

[s.z.ichigo]

I used WWE4 for my fifth grader this year. The longer dictations just seemed downright cruel in some cases! Then I watched the videos shown above, and realized that it's not expected that you should be able to give a 60-75 word dictation in only three readings. I started letting her read the passage along with me, pointing out the punctuation and the difficult spellings, before ever sitting down for the three read-throughs. It helped a lot.

I also read the WWE teacher book (which I hadn't read because I bought it without knowing that it was uneccesary), and it said that dictations that you pick yourself should be 25-30 words, even at the end of the year. MUCH shorter than even the average dictation in the Student Book. That took a lot of the pressure off.

For the really long ones, I had to first figure out if she was really having trouble because of the dictation length/complexity, or if she was just tired and unfocused. Sometimes just waiting til later helped. If the dictation was really the problem and nothing else was helping, I would let her split it into two more managable chucks. I rarely had to do anything more than that. There were one or two that were just not working, usually because of extremely unfamiliar, old-fashioned language, and I had to give sentence-by-sentence. The preamble to the constitution comes to mind.

For ONE dictation, which was basically an extremely long list of things separated by commas (I believe it was a passage from A (The?) Little Princess), I did just give up. I gave her the book and told her to copy it down, looking at the book as few times as she thought she could manage!