Teaching Phonics with Copywork and Dictation

Today we had a great spelling and phonics lesson while doing our dictation.

We are using Emma Serl’s Primary Language Lessons that has dictation lessons from time to time. My youngest kids are not ready to do dictation without any help so I coach them through it.

We look and read the dictation passage. Then we all identify the difficult words.

Today’s words were; horses, taught , lives, father, load, many, where and there. Then we have a small whiteboard and some coloured whiteboard markers and we practice writing the words on the whiteboard. We keep rubbing them out until we get them right. I also take this opportunity to identify the phonograms, ‘augh’ in taught, ‘oa’ in load and the difference between ‘there’ and ‘their’.

When I know they are confident with the words in the sentence then we do a dictation sentence. Then I start working on the next sentence. Today we did three sentences. After the dictation we sometimes do a little extra phonics. For example I wrote ‘augh’ and asked them to fill in the letters for ‘taught’. Then I write it again to see if they can write the letters for caught. For ‘oa’ I ask them to fill in the letters for boat and load etc. This whole lesson takes about 30 mins. That seems to be enough for us all.

We have never used a formal spelling program but we did start with a phonics based reading program. This was good for me because I learnt about the phonograms. Now I can easily break down words to help the kids understand the spelling. Most of the phonics I already knew(and I am sure you do too) I just hadn’t put much thought into it until I had to teach it. I think teaching spelling and writing using this method is a very natural.

Here is a list of phonograms

Jan Brett has some beautiful phonogram flash cards.