Hi, Misty –

I’m not sure if this suggestion will help you or not.  It might be something you are already very careful with, but I’ve realized over the last few months that I needed to slow my reading way down.  I would probably flip out if I could hear a recording of some of my readings when I first started having my children narrate – I bet it was way too fast for them.  Now, I read much, much slower — especially during parts that I know are going to be more confusing and that their brains are going to need just that little bit of extra time to process the info.  I have found that by doing this and reading with a LOT of expression – even more than I had before, which I thought was still expressive – my children seem to be able to pay better attention and they are understanding the passage.  My 8 year old does pretty well with narrating from the Bible – we use the NIV.  I think it would depend on what passages they are narrating — stories from the OT and the gospels seem like they would be much easier for a child to narrate.  Asking them to narrate from Romans or Hebrews would draw looks of confusion from my kids.  LOL 

I guess that there could be various reasons that you are having trouble getting good narrations.  It could be what I mentioned above, or it could be that the resource you are using really is too difficult for them at this point, it could be lack of attentiveness, it could be that they feel under pressure with narrations (sometimes my children freeze up with narrations and I have to remind them again that I don’t expect them to narrate every single thing from the passage – they should listen fully and then relax and just tell me in their own words what they heard or read – this seems to free them up a bit). 

O.K.  Now that I re-read your post, it does seem that maybe it could be lack of attentiveness.  We’ve had this at various times around here, too, and usually I just sit my older kiddos down, explain that I expect with each reading we do that they will listen as if they have to narrate (for the most part, we narrate pretty much everything).  I explain that they are doing themselves and me a disservice by not being attentive.   We talk a lot about how important it is to give yourself fully to the task at hand and how much this will help them as they get older (in all aspects of life).  Then, if our narrations have really gone that downhill, I read and we narrate every paragraph or every couple of paragraphs for a few days (or less) until I see that they are fully engaged.  I would definitely suggest not to call on the same child first each time.  They need to know that they could be called on at any time to narrate and they should be prepared for that.  So, one time, ask your middle to go first and then see if the oldest can fill in some details afterwards.  Next time, ask the youngest to go first.  Or, ask one of them to narrate a couple of times in a row.  I never tell my children who I will be asking to narrate until after the reading.

One other thing that helped me tremendously was to read Charlotte’s recommendations of reading only once.  When you ask for a narration and the child doesn’t narrate well, don’t get angry.  If the child admits that they weren’t paying attention, I will usually just say something like, “Oh, that’s too bad – that was really an important part of the story.  I hope that you can pay better attention next time.”….and then we go on.  They do not like this and we don’t have to do it very often.

As far as written narrations for your 11-year-old, it seems that he is ready.  I would start off slow – maybe one a week at first?  Hopefully others will give some advice, because we have only been in this phase a little while.

Sorry this got so long — I now have my own narration question(s) to ask, so I’m off to post that!