glamayr okalana malville

[Tamela Vandonsel]

How are you? How is university? I am back at school, of course! I have got a new teacher, Miss Jones. She is an excellent teacher but she is really strict! She teaches science and she is brilliant at explaining new ideas. I like her because she is friendly and she does not shout.

We have got a lot of exams this year, so I have to do homework every night. I also practise with my dance group four times a week. We are practising really hard at the moment because we have got an audition for a big talent competition. We need a cool name for our group. Have you got any ideas?

I remember the first time I heard hip-hop. It was 1980. I was at a party in New York. There was a young DJ at the party. He was playing records on two turntables. While he was putting a record on, a kid picked up a microphone and began rapping. Some other kids were break-dancing to the music. It was loud and repetitive, and I hated it. I preferred jazz. There were also many famous rock bands which I would rather listen to than hip-hop. Take for example the Rolling Stones.

I had a great time last night! I went to see Cornershop in concert. They were brilliant! I went with Lisa and her sister, Leila. After school, Leila picked us up in her car and we drove to the city centre. We arrived about at about five oclock. First we had something to eat in a caf and then we walked to the concert hall. We joined a big queue outside and waited for ages to get in. We were worried about finding good seats because there were so many people in front of us. In the end we stood at the front, near the stage. During the concert, everyone was dancing and singing. It was brilliant! The concert finished at 10 oclock. Afterwards, Leila drove us back home and Lisa and I fell asleep in the car.

Dictation 9
Have you had the flu yet this winter? Why do more people get flu in winter than in summer? This fact has puzzled scientist for many years. But a new study has just shown that the flu virus prefers the cold, dry air in winter. Perhaps that means that the usual advice for treating flu symptoms is correct: stay warm and drink lots of fluids. And remember: take painkillers, not antibiotics, for viral illnesses!

Professional sports people know a lot about how to get healthy and to stay healthy. Cycling celebrity Lance Armstrong, in particular, has promoted good health and a healthy lifestyle. He has won many international cycling competitions, including the Tour de France, which he won seven times in a row from 1999 to 2005. But he has also been ill. He had cancer at the age of 25. For this reason he believes people should use their free time to stay fit, by doing regular exercise or training. They should also eat healthy food. This helps the body to be strong and to fight illness.

Emma Watson is a young British actress. She is famous for her role as Hermione in the Harry Potter films and has won many acting awards. Although she has been busy acting in the films, she has continued to study hard at school as well. She left school with excellent grades and went on to study at an American university. Emma Watson has not become a typical celebrity, even though she has been in the media a lot. In interviews she is a very confident, polite and friendly person. She is the perfect role model for young people today.

The organisation Malaria No More gives mosquito nets and maleria drugs to families and it sponsors traditional health education in Africa. In Europe and the USA, it uses the sports and entertainment industry to raise money for its activities in Africa. Forty million people have seen the special shows on American Idol and the campaign has raised enough money to buy fifteen million mosquito nets. Sports celebrities Andy Murray and David Beckham launched the Malaria No More UK campaign at the Wembley Stadium in London, explaining that we can save a childs life for less than the price of a football.

I hope you re having a nice time with Aunt Sally and the baby. Its rained all week, so we havent been able to hang the clothes out to dry. Dad says we need to use the dryer, but we dont know how to use it. Can you send us some instructions?

PacoDictation 24Last weekend I went to the Science museum in Leeds with my friends. There were lots of things to see and do there, There was a space lab where you could look at the planets, a 3D cinema and a car design laboratory. In general it was very good. The car design lab was especially interesting. The worst thing was that it was very expensive, especially the shop. Also some of the exhibits were old and broken and the food they gave us was horrible.

Though he is a good speller, he is not as good at remembering to indent and to use proper sentence punctuation. Our previous spelling program never focused on that! I can see now why studied dictation helps kids become better writers. We are moving along rather nicely now, but he still forgets to indent now and then and he still ends up needing to do passages with question marks several times. On very rare occasions, he spells a word wrong. Overall, he misses one passage a week and needs to redo that. I can see he is learning so much and becoming a more careful writer.

Today we want to talk about how to do formal spelling lessons in a Charlotte Mason way: dictation. If you have been following the previous articles in this How To series, you will have seen how Charlotte included some spelling components in both copywork and transcription. (And even in beginning reading lessons.) Those preparatory practices have laid the foundation for more formal spelling lessons in a couple of ways.

Some students will benefit from transcribing the passage during this studying step, but not all of them will. For some students, transcribing the passage will help solidify it in their minds; for others, transcription will just be busywork. So teach the child. Use this step of the lesson to help each child discover and customize the study techniques that will fit him best.

Now look for any words you are not one hundred percent sure you know how to spell correctly. Focus on those words and study them, however you learn best, until you have learned their spellings. Go ahead and pause here if you need to. When you are sure you know how to spell all of those words, come back and begin reading again.

The first way to level a dictation passage up or down is by adjusting its length. The longer the passage, the more potential words to be learned and written. Your sweet spot will be no more than three or four unknown words in a passage. So if the passage has ten or fifteen word spellings that have to be learned, shorten it to where it has only three or four new words maximum.

The second way to level up or down is to adjust the length of the passage to be written. It is perfectly acceptable to assign a longer passage for studying, but then dictate only a portion of that passage for writing. In fact, as your student gets older and builds up that mental storehouse, you will be assigning longer passages to study but you will be dictating only a portion of each passage.

I think I've tried a lot of different ways to translate student performance to some kind of measurable value (for the purposes of calculating a grade, and to provide a data point for students that reflects their performance), but am trying to see if there are better practices out there.

Some number of points per pitch (usually double-weighted if it's a chromatic pitch) -- I *may* give partial credit if they get a diatonic interval off for an extended period of time, but often not, since that indicates that they were not thinking about tonal function to reorient themselves.

Some number of points per half-measure of rhythm -- only one deduction if there is a consistent rhythmic displacement of a beat for a few measures, for instance.

Sight-singing is tougher, because there are so many variations on how things can go awry. I experimented with rubrics like I used for sight-singing, but these led to overall scores that just didn't "feel" right.

We ended up moving to a "jury" format for end-of-the-semester final exams, where a panel of two or three aural skills instructors listen to a number of exercises, prepared and at-sight, and assign a letter grade (or a percentage, if it's less than a D). These are translated to percentages and averaged. It's a bit time-consuming (I had a huge spreadsheet set up that I could type numbers into, so I could also get metadata about class averages, average score per exercise, etc.), but it gives a bit more validity to the final grade.

Thanks Eric and Gary! These are great ideas. Eric, that's great to hear about your take on grading sight-singing with a jury; I think I'll implement something similar at our (small) department, and also see if I can co-create a rubric together with the students.

Gary, your book has been a huge help! Thanks for the tip on assessment vs. evaluation. I'm structuring the semester with a lot of formative assessment, but it's always been tricky to translate performance to a grade in such a way that would be useful (and encouraging) for students.

In addition to Gary's discussion in ASA, Jeffrey Gillespie has an article called "Melodic Dictation Scoring Methods: An Exploratory Study" in the Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy Vol. 15 (2001), while Stan Kleppinger's 2017 article in Indiana Theory Review, "Practical and Philosophical Reflections Regarding Aural Skills Assessment," has some important critiques of these traditional approaches.

I hope you'll forgive my climbing up on my soapbox for a minute, but I often find approaches to assessment in aural skills classes to be insufficiently goal-directed. In my own teaching, I always make sure I have a primary goal for each exercise: for example, perhaps a sight-singing (or prepared singing) exercise is designed for students to apply and perfect an approach to (say) across-the-beat triplets, or perhaps a dictation is intended for students to demonstrate their ability to determine tonic. Whatever my goal is, I make sure I have actually been giving instruction in that area recently, and if a student meets that goal, then regardless of what other errors they make, they receive a passing grade. I usually give either 0/10 (didn't meet the goal regardless of how good the rest was, please try again), 8/10 (met the goal but still room for improvement beyond that), or 10/10 (excellent).

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