Dictation Sentence Activities to Promote Repeated Reading

Repeated reading helps students practice many important comprehension skills. Rereading a text encourages fluency, promotes sight word recognition through repetition, and practices phrasing, expression, and attention to punctuation.

• Ask students to reread the sentence in a different way (louder, whisper, faster, slower, etc.)
• Give students a different emotion when reading the sentence (in voices that are angry, excited, sad, etc.) Different pitches communicate emotions.

• Ask students to emphasize different words within the sentence. This not only practices re-reading but also changes the meaning of the sentence.

Examples:

• “The dog barked at the cat.”might imply, “What/who was doing the barking?

• “The dog barked at the cat.”might mean, “What was the dog doing?”
• “The dog barked at the cat.” may lead you to wonder, “What was the dog barking at?”

Practice intonation:

• In declarative sentences, the voice falls at the end. Interrogative sentences usually end in a rising voice.
• Intonation tends to rise and fall within clauses. For example, a sentence with a list of words or phrases separated by commas tends to have inflection on all parts of the list except for the last one (anticipating the end).
• Underline phrases within a sentence and encourage students to practice reading the sentence with phrasing. For the Clean Copy of the dictation sentences, separate the sentences into phrases, writing the phraseson steps:

Do you have

the tongs

from the dishpan?

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Written by Ingrid Hartig

Ingrid is an Education Consultant with Brainspring.

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