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One of the beauties of narration is that we can customize the length of a reading before we ask for the narration. For some students, it might be easy to listen to a whole chapter before narrating; for others, it might be a challenge to listen to just one paragraph. But Charlotte Mason recognized that wide spectrum and encouraged us to break apart longer readings into shorter segments as needed.
We definitely want to start shorter when a student is new to narration, but how quickly that student progresses to longer passages can vary widely depending on the individual. And that’s okay. The object is not to plow through the material and check it off as completed; the object is to give your student living ideas at her pace and let her assimilate what she is ready for.
So let’s talk about how to break apart a longer reading into shorter segments that make sense. Here are some principles and practical tips for you.
Tip #1: Find Natural Pause Points
Here’s one principle to start with: When you’re dividing a longer passage into shorter segments, don’t just stop anywhere. The points at which you pause your reading can affect how well your student can mentally piece together the whole passage when you get to the end.
You want to include a complete thought or idea in each segment. So if you’re reading the story of Creation from Genesis 1, for example, a logical place to pause would be at the end of the description for each day of Creation. If your student can take in more than one day’s description at a time, you could read two days’ descriptions before you pause. What you don’t want to do is read one and a half, stopping abruptly partway through Day Two’s description.
The same concept goes for passages that contain conversations. You don’t want to stop in the middle of a conversation usually. Perhaps you are reading aloud The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and you come to chapter 3, “How Dorothy Saved the Scarecrow.” There is a lot of dialogue in that chapter, and you’ll want to be careful that you don’t stop in the middle of a conversation. Here’s how one of those exchanges begins:
“Good day,” said the Scarecrow, in a rather husky voice.
“Did you speak?” asked the girl, in wonder.
“Certainly,” answered the Scarecrow. “How do you do?”
Now that might seem to be a good stopping point. But if you look at the next line, you’ll discover that it makes for a difficult re-entry if you pause there:
“I’m pretty well, thank you,” replied Dorothy politely. “How do you do?”
Dorothy is replying, and it is awkward to begin a reading with a reply. If we would just keep reading for three more lines, we will reach the end of this conversation:
“I’m not feeling well,” said the Scarecrow, with a smile, “for it is very tedious being perched up here night and day to scare away crows.”
“Can’t you get down?” asked Dorothy.
“No, for this pole is stuck up my back. If you will please take away the pole I shall be greatly obliged to you.”
Now we have a good pause point. The dialogue pauses naturally in the book—the next line tells the action that Dorothy took—so we can pause here too and have the student narrate what has transpired in the conversation. Then we can pick up with the action and go on from there.
Of course, some books have long conversations with pages and pages of dialogue, but you can usually still find logical places to pause in the conversation. There is no hard and fast rule that you must read a certain number of lines before pausing. Look for natural pause points in descriptions and in conversations.
The same principle holds true for passages that narrate several events in a person’s life: Try to pause between episodes. So for example, if you are reading about Joseph in the Bible, you could pause at the end of each chapter, but there are usually shorter episodes contained within each chapter.
Genesis 37 contains these episodes: (1) Jacob gives Joseph a coat of many colors and his brothers are jealous; (2) Joseph dreams about his family bowing down to him and tells them about those dreams; (3) Jacob sends Joseph to check on his brothers in the fields and a man helps Joseph find them; (4) the brothers conspire to get rid of Joseph; (5) the brothers sell Joseph as a slave and lie to their father about it.
That’s five different episodes within one chapter. And just as with the description passage, you can pause after each episode or you can combine two of the episodes, or even three, depending on how long of a section your student is ready for.
Let me give you two tips for finding those episode breaks. First, look for key words that signal a time change or a change of topic. Usually those key words occur at the beginning of a paragraph. So you might see “The next morning….” at the beginning of a paragraph. That might make a good place to pause the reading and pick up at that paragraph for the next section, depending on how it fits into the rest of the passage. You might see “When so-and-so woke up….” or “Later in the day….” Those time-change words can often signal good places to pause.
If the passage is descriptive, you might see key words such as “Another thing to consider is…” or the author’s points might even be labeled as “first, second, third,” and so on. Key words can help you find logical pause points.
Tip #2: Reverse Outline
The second tip to find those logical stopping points is to reverse outline the passage. You may have done some outlining in high school when you were assigned to write a longer research paper or an essay. In that case you created an outline that showed the points that you wanted to include and the order in which you wanted to include them. Reverse outlining is similar, but you are taking the finished paper or essay—or in this case, the chapter—and you are creating an outline based on what that author already wrote. You are trying to visualize the structure of the piece.
Here’s a simple example. Think about the story of The Three Pigs. First, the pigs are sent out to make their own ways in the world. Second, they each build their house out of their chosen material: one out of straw, one of sticks, and one of bricks. Third, we see how each of their houses stands up to the big, bad wolf. There you go; that’s one way to outline the story.
You could also get more detailed. Under the part where they each build their house, you could itemize some sub-points for each pig and what it chose: one sub-point for the pig with the house of straw, one for the pig with the house of sticks, and one for the pig with the house of bricks. And you could do the same sub-points with how their houses stood up to the wolf, taking each pig in turn.
Once you have visualized the structure of the passage, you can see logical places to pause the reading. You might read the text for an entire outline point or you could read just the text for one of the sub-points, depending on where your student is in the process. Reverse outlining gives you a framework for determining good places to pause in a passage.
Tip #3: Consider Timing
Here’s another principle to keep in mind: Even when you are breaking apart a reading into smaller sections, you want to be aware of the time you are spending on the entire lesson. Be careful not to exceed the maximum time allotted for the reading and the narration together. For first through third grade, that maximum is 20 minutes. No lesson should be longer than 20 minutes. You can do a shorter lesson, but don’t do a longer one. And keep in mind that the 20-minutes limit includes both reading and narrating.
So if you are breaking apart a reading, read the first section and have your student narrate. Then look at the clock and see if you have time to do another section, both the reading and the narration, without going past your maximum time. If you have time, go ahead; but if you don’t, then stop there and pick up at that point the next day that the book is scheduled.
That maximum time can be bumped out to 30 minutes for fourth through sixth graders and 45 minutes for seventh grade and up. But remember, those are maximum times. Keep the lessons shorter if that is what your student needs in order to give full attention for the entire lesson.
So how do you know how long another section might take? Well, you can get an idea of how long it will take you to cover a passage if you do a little timed experiment beforehand. Grab a stopwatch, or use the stopwatch on your phone, and open one of your student’s books to any page. Start the stopwatch and begin reading aloud at your usual pace. When you have read five lines, stop the stopwatch and note the time that it took you to read those lines. Multiply that time to get to 60 seconds and you will have an approximate guideline for how many lines of a passage you will probably be able to read in a minute.
For example, if it took you about 20 seconds to read aloud 5 lines, that means you would be able to read about 15 lines in a minute. (Specifically, in math terms, 20 seconds x 3 = 60 seconds, or a minute. So multiply the 5 lines x the same number, 3: 5 lines x 3 = 15 lines per minute.) Now you have a loose estimator. If the section that you plan to read is about 30 lines long, you can estimate that it will probably take about 2 minutes to read it aloud.
Now here’s a little tip that I’ve picked up over the years: allow about the same amount of time to narrate as to read. So if you estimate that the section will probably take 2 minutes to read, allow another 2 minutes for the narration. If the next section will take 3 minutes to read, allow another 3 minutes for that narration. Using that little estimating tool, you can get an idea of how many sections you might expect to include in one lesson.
Tip #4: Mark Your Pause Points
And here’s another little tip: Once you have determined where your section breaks make the most sense, make little pencil marks or place little self-stick flags in your book at those spots. That way you can focus on reading aloud and see at a glance where to pause when you come to one of your markers.
As with any skill, the more you practice breaking apart a longer reading, the easier it’s going to become. But often our tendency is to pick up the book and try to feel our way through and find good stopping points as we go along. It’s not impossible to do, but, believe me, it’s making things more difficult for yourself than they need to be. It’s worth it to take five minutes or so to look through a passage ahead of time and determine where it makes sense to break it apart into sections. Those few minutes of preparation will help you feel more confident and at peace as you present the lesson and give your student the advantage of a well-planned, well-thought-through reading.
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