Sara R
02-02-2009, 04:06 PM
I just started part time homeschooling my 5th grade daughter. She was getting behind in math and writing. My daughter must have some sort of learning disability that makes it hard for her to speak grammatically. It is difficult to understand her oral language, and of course that translates into weakness in writing. It sounded like narration and dictation are just what she needs so she can progress, so I ordered "Writing with Ease" so I could get a better handle on that.
We started today, and it went well! She has a science fair project to finish, so we applied the narration/dictation method to that project. We used a digital recorder, which is a handy gadget for this!
She had to write a paragraph about the results of the project. I broke it down into sentences. "First say a complete sentence about what the mouse did in the maze." (She studies Shurley grammar at school so she knows what a sentence is.) She said something, and if there was something wrong with it I helped her change it. Then I had her repeat it a couple of times. Once she had the sentence I had her record it on the digital recorder. She listened to it a couple of times there, which she thought was very fun. Then she wrote it down. Then she replayed the the sentence to check what she'd written. If she missed something, I pointed it out. Then we looked for errors in spelling or capitalization. After that, of her own accord she labeled the sentence like it was an assignment for Shurley. When the sentence was good, we repeated the process for the next sentence.
At the end, we had a decent paragraph about what happened in her science project! She had done the writing, but each step wasn't overwhelming. I'm excited and hopeful for her writing ability.
We started today, and it went well! She has a science fair project to finish, so we applied the narration/dictation method to that project. We used a digital recorder, which is a handy gadget for this!
She had to write a paragraph about the results of the project. I broke it down into sentences. "First say a complete sentence about what the mouse did in the maze." (She studies Shurley grammar at school so she knows what a sentence is.) She said something, and if there was something wrong with it I helped her change it. Then I had her repeat it a couple of times. Once she had the sentence I had her record it on the digital recorder. She listened to it a couple of times there, which she thought was very fun. Then she wrote it down. Then she replayed the the sentence to check what she'd written. If she missed something, I pointed it out. Then we looked for errors in spelling or capitalization. After that, of her own accord she labeled the sentence like it was an assignment for Shurley. When the sentence was good, we repeated the process for the next sentence.
At the end, we had a decent paragraph about what happened in her science project! She had done the writing, but each step wasn't overwhelming. I'm excited and hopeful for her writing ability.