Activities

I work with Spanich speaking adults at my community college. Every week they have several dictation sentences along with their spelling test. Unfortunately, they never seem to do very well, and they end up asking me to repeat the sentence a million times.

As a result, I designed a dictation game to help them prepare for their weekly tests. I take about ten sentences from their weekly story and right the words on small peices of cardboard. They day of the game I break them into teams of three and read the sentences. The first team to build the sentence gets the point. They have to buzz in, I like to use the buzzer from the game taboo, in order for me to check their sentence.

The other teams keep working until someone gets it right. They have to make sure that they have capitals, correct punctuation and spelling, and the right words. For example I might try to trick them with by, bye, and buy. This game seems to really work well. The students really get into the spirit of the competition, but more importantly their dictation abilities on their weekly tests are improving dramatically.