It recently came to my attention that at his age, I should be dictating the first sentence of my son's narration back to him before he starts to copy it. That meant our procedure would have to change a bit. I usually have my son give me his narration first, so he could model it for my daughter who struggles. The change meant she would have to go first. So, we tried that today. And this is how the dictation proceeded.
Here are the first three sentences he dictated to me:
"Muhammad died. They chose a new leader, Abu Bakr. He was called the Caliph which means ruler of the Islamic Empire."
I told him I would say the first two sentences (since the first one was so short) and he was to repeat them back to me before he started writing. Before I read the second sentence, I told him, "There's a comma in it. Listen for the comma so you know where to put it."
He repeated the sentences after me, including the pause for the comma. He had no trouble writing the first sentence (though I had to spell both "Muhammad" and "died.") But he got as far as "they" for the second sentence and then couldn't remember what he was supposed to write. So I told him, "You already know what happened. What did they do?"
And he wote, "They chose a new Caliph, Abu Bakr." ("Abu Bakr" and "caliph" were up on the board!)
So, before I handed him his narration to copy, we did a little editing. We changed the third sentence to read, "The Caliph is the ruler of the Islamic Empire."
Much better, no?
And does anyone know if "Caliph" is supposed to be capitalised or not?
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2 comments:
When I was his age, I'd never heard of a Caliph -- very good for you all!
I googled Caliph and most of the occurrences, on the first page at least, were capitalized. Not that google has the ultimate say-so on such things, but, um, maybe that helped? Or not.
That was kind of you. As the Caliph is the religious leader of the Islamic faith, I would assume one ought to capitalise it, just as one capitalises "Pope."
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