Sentence dictation is one of those routines that, although it’s very beneficial, doesn’t always get the spotlight it deserves. This is especially true when it comes to students who are in the early stages of reading and writing.
If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that you’re currently teaching the short A CVC pattern to your students. You’re probably already introducing words like “cat”, “sad”, or “hat”, and guiding your class through decoding and encoding short A words.
If so, now is the perfect time to go beyond practicing words in isolation and move towards helping your students apply what they’re learning by writing full sentences. That’s where short A CVC sentence dictation comes in!
But without a structured approach or the right tools, sentence dictation can feel a bit overwhelming to implement, and it might feel frustrating to your kids.
In this post, I’m going to walk you through everything you need to know about using short A CVC sentence dictation in your structured literacy classroom. I’ll go over questions you might have, as well as ways you can implement sentence dictation with short A words and some mistakes or pitfalls you’ll want to avoid. Also, I’m going to talk about why I created a resource that makes sentence dictation for short A CVC super easy, effective, and actually fun!
Why Sentence Dictation with Short A CVC Words Makes Sense
Moving Beyond Word Lists
Too often, CVC word practice stops at word cards or word lists. But true mastery shows up when students can use those words in context and spell them accurately. That’s what makes short a CVC sentence dictation so valuable.
As my husband (a former first grade teacher of 17 years) has said, “If I could go back in time, I would have made sentence dictation a regular routine, tied directly to the skill of the week.” In his classroom, he used dictation occasionally, but not in a systematic way. He didn’t yet know how powerful it could be to move from decoding and encoding individual words into full sentence application all in the same week.
Once we began developing structured literacy resources for our TpT store, we became much more intentional about that connection. Our goal? To help students apply what they’ve learned phoneme by phoneme, word by word, and sentence by sentence.
Supporting Encoding and Syntax
When students hear a sentence and translate it to the page, they’re doing far more than just spelling. They’re doing a number of very important things at once:
- They’re practicing sound symbol correspondence.
- They’re getting better at segmenting words.
- They are applying rules of capitalization and punctuation.
- And they’re building their understanding of sentence structure and syntax.
Yes, it may be very scaffolded, and it may include decodable short A CVC words, but the fact of the matter is this: your students are taking ownership in real writing.
What Are Some Examples of Simple Sentences with Short A CVC Words?
In case you’re on the hunt for some simple short A CVC sentences for your kids, here are a few that work great for dictation:
- Dan had jam.
- Jan is sad.
- Max has a hat.
- The man has a van.
- A cat is in the bag.
Each of these sentences is contains decodable words with the short A vowel. If you recently taught short A CVC to your students, and if they’re familiar with these heart words (or high-frequency words), then writing these sentences independently should be quite achievable for them!
Although these sentences are very simple, they are introducing your students to basic sentence structures they will need to learn soon enough. For example, take the sentence, “Dan had jam.” It has a subject, verb, and an object.
In our short A CVC sentence dictation resource, we pair each sentence with a real-life photo. For the sentence “Dan had Jam,” we use a photo of a little boy who just ate from a jam jar (as evidenced by the jam all over his mouth!). It’s relatable and funny, and kids love it! I try to get my students to make connections to what we are reading and writing, so with this one I ask, “Who has a little sibling who gets food all over their face when they eat?” Lots of hands get raised!
Then there’s the sentence, “Max has a hat.” The photo we use for this is a cute dog sporting a party hat and some star-shaped glasses. This is another one that always gets a smile or an “Awww!”
My Go-To Routine for Short A CVC Sentence Dictation
What You Need (and Already Have)
One of my favorite things about sentence dictation is that you don’t need anything fancy to get started. You just need:
- Your voice
- A whiteboard, printed page, or lined paper for each student
- A sentence prompt tied to the current phonics skill
- A consistent, repeatable process
We created our short A CVC sentence dictation worksheets so they can work with:
- Individual whiteboards (with our digital slides)
- Printed student pages
- Small groups, whole class, special education, or intervention
Step-by-Step Dictation Routine
Here’s the basic procedure we follow, based on an approach outlined in Judith Birsh’s Multisensory Teaching of Basic Language Skills:
- Look and Listen – Say the sentence aloud with expression, encouraging students to watch your mouth and listen closely. It helps to use exaggerated phrasing so students can remember them in chunks. I model holding up a finger for each word I say.
- Echo – Have students repeat the sentence back to you while counting the words on their fingers. They then draw that number of lines on their paper or whiteboard. If using our printed student pages, the lines are already provided!
- Write – Once your students have echoed the sentence correctly, give them a signal to start writing. This could be either a predetermined hand motion or a simple verbal cue like “Write!” Doing this allows your children to practice actually remembering a sentence word for word prior to putting it to paper. If I’m leading a small group, I have each student repeat the sentence back to me, saving the student with the weakest memory for last so they hear it multiple times before it’s their turn.
- Proofread – After students finish writing, reread the sentence aloud three times and tell them to check for these things:
- First read: Check for missing words. Students point to each word they wrote. Give them time to add any words they may have missed. They give themselves a checkmark if they got them all.
- Second read: Check for capitalization and punctuation. All good? Then another check mark.
- Third read: Check for correct spelling. Take notice if there are common spelling errors and ask students to point to that word and “chop it up” (segment phonemes) while pointing to the letters they wrote. This gives them another opportunity to catch their own mistakes and fix them up before you reveal the complete sentence in writing. This leads to a greater feeling of ownership.
After proofreading, have your students read their sentence out loud. Then write the sentence on your board (or display the digital slide if you have our resource). Do one final check, making sure what your students wrote matches the displayed sentence. Give specific praise celebrating what your students did successfully!
If you are using our short A CVC sentence dictation resource, you have the option of revealing one word at a time for students to check and correct their own work. I love this option because it seems to focus my kids’ attention better than when I just write the sentence on the board.
Use Visuals of Short A CVC Words Alongside Sentence Dictation Prompts.
I’ve always noticed that our young emerging writers stay far more engaged when there’s a visual element tied to their writing tasks.
That’s just one of the reasons we decided to use a real photo prompt with each of the dictation sentences in our resource.
When we looked around at other sentence dictation resources out there, we discovered that many of them had either clipart or no imagery at all. We decided to find and use photos that our young students would find interesting or entertaining or anything else that could help anchor that accompanying sentence in their memory.
An additional benefit of using real photos involves better vocabulary. For students who are bilingual, photographs can give them essential language support. They get immediate context for any words that might be unfamiliar to them.
Support All Writers With Differentiated Short A Sentence Dictation.
In every classroom, you’ll find students with a wide range of skills. My husband and I were both first grade teachers for many years. One thing you can almost guarantee in a first grade classroom is having kids who need tons of spelling support sitting right next to kids who are ready to write several sentences on their own.
That’s why we designed our short A CVC printable dictation sheets to be fully differentiated. For just $3, you’ll receive:
- Fill-in-the-blank sentences for emerging writers
- Sentence frames with support lines
- Full dictation pages with just handwriting lines
- Caption writing for picture-based creativity
- Paragraph writing for more advanced students
As an intervention specialist working with both kindergartners and first graders, I see the need for this kind of differentiation every day.
No matter where your students are, there’s an entry point that helps them feel successful!
Common Sentence Dictation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
You can be an experienced teacher and still not feel totally comfortable with sentence dictation right away. If you got your teaching license decades ago like us, your training likely involved the writer’s workshop approach, without much structured literacy. Here are a few things to keep in mind when you’re implementing sentence dictation:
Mistake 1: Rushing Through the Routine
Sentence dictation isn’t just about getting your kids to write. It’s about getting them to process what they’re hearing, to add meaning to it in a way that makes sense to them.
Give students time to hear what you are saying to them, to internalize it. Then, they should repeat the sentence back to you. If you allow for all of these things to happen before you expect your students to write, it will go more smoothly!
Mistake 2: Not Aligning Dictation to the Phonics Skill
One of the hallmarks of a structured literacy approach is not straying away from what you are currently teaching. If you’re teaching short A CVC words this week, it makes sense that the sentences you dictate to your students to write should only include short A CVC words and previously taught skills and/or heart words. Otherwise, your students have a good chance of getting thrown off by unfamiliar word patterns.
Mistake 3: Using One Format for Everyone
You wouldn’t expect your beginning writers to write an entire paragraph on their own. So should your more independent writers be expected to sit there and write a three-word sentence along with the rest of the class? I’m all for whole group instruction and I know the impossibility of differentiating everything all the time for every student. But with sentence dictation, it’s pretty easy to meet many students’ needs at once.
Providing options, like dictated fill-in-the-blank sentences versus open-ended writing, makes this kind of writing time more accessible and useful to all students. If I have a small group of advanced writers, I may put the writing prompt page at a center for them to write independently while I lead the rest of the class in guided dictation.
Why Teachers (and Kids) Love This Resource
We’ve heard from so many teachers who’ve used our short A sentence dictation resource successfully across a wide range of classrooms.
It’s been especially helpful for:
- Students with learning difficulties
- Emerging bilinguals/ESOL/ENL students
- Students receiving intervention or SPED support
Best of all? Teachers tell us their students are excited to write. That’s something that doesn’t always come easily! One of the features we strive for in our resources is relatability. Not only do we try to find real photographs that kids will relate to, but we also pay attention to the wording of the sentence itself in order to avoid the awkward language you’ll find in so many other decodable text and sentence dictation resources.
Get Started With Short A CVC Sentence Dictation Today
If you like what you’ve read up to this point, I’d love to help you get this routine set up in your classroom. Our short A CVC sentence dictation resource is perfect for that. You’ll get real-photo prompts, multiple levels of differentiated support, ready to go printables, and no-prep digital formats. Whether you’re teaching whole group, small group, or one-on-one, you can start tomorrow.
Click here or on the cover below to grab your copy of our Dictated Sentences for Short A CVC Words with Photo Writing Prompts.
Looking for More?
If you like this resource and want to be more consistent with your sentence dictation routine, we’ve got more! Our Sentence Dictation Bundle covers short vowels, digraphs, blends, and more. You can use the same predictable process week after week with each new phonics skill you teach.
Whether you’re new to sentence dictation or just looking to make it more fun and effective, I hope this post gave you some practical, encouraging ideas to bring into your classroom. Let me know if you give this a try. I’d love to hear how it goes. I wish you and your students much success and enjoyment as you master your sentence dictation routine!