Burgess Animal Book for Children – struggle on narration – help!

The Burgess books do seem to be a bit harder to narrate.  There is a lot of information in each chapter.  My DD6 enjoys them, but I think it’s because I relax a bit in terms of narration.  We do one chapter from the Animal book and one from the Bird Book each week.  I don’t think I would do more than that.  When AO schedules these books, they only use it once every few weeks.  I think 6 birds or animals a term.  I think it helps to space it out, so you have time to think about one or two animals from a chapter before learning more details about more animals.

When reading, I stop regularly, not necessarily after a certain number of paragraphs, but more where it makes sense in the story.  I ask a fairly open ended question, such as “Tell me something about what this animal looks like.”  or  “What did you learn about where this animal lives and what he likes to eat?”  or “How is this bird different from the one at the beginning of the chapter?”  It helps her focus her attention on the details from the story, rather than just ‘tell me everything’.  I don’t expect her to narrate the whole story or give me every detail, just enough to give a sense of what the animal or bird is like.  Sometimes I do a bit of narrating myself, making a comment or two about the animal or bird, telling something that struck me as interesting or that I didn’t know before.  Then it’s more a conversation, with both of us sharing what we noticed.

I did find that it took several chapters before DD seemed to really appreciate the books.  We started with Bird Book in the fall, when we could also watch birds outside for a while. Then we switched to Animal Book in the winter.  In the spring I suggested switching back to Bird book for a while, since we had many birds at our feeders, but DD insisted we had to do both books now!  You can also jump around a bit if you like, picking animals that your children might already be familiar with.  We did that with the Bird Book, reading chapters about birds DD had already seen.  Then we started back going through from the beginning.

Hope that helps!

Joanne

A couple of ideas off the top of my head:

You might also try having them do a drawn narration of the chapter as they are listening – I get really detailed narrations sometimes that I wouldn’t have gotten without the drawing to “hang” their ideas to.  

Take turns doing narrations with them (you do one, then they do one).  

Sometimes just coloring a page seems to give my littles brains and body a chance to relax and listen while still wiggling.  I usually google a picture of the animal or bird we are studying in that chapter though.

I also have to say that maybe his other books like The Adventures of Buster Bear, or Blacky the Crow, or Sammy Jay, etc. might be a better place to start since he focuses on that character for longer amounts of time.  It would give your kids a chance to make a connection to a particular animal and your narrations could improve with that.

Your kids are also young and are building the skill, so be patient and persistent.  =)

Here are some links that I just remembered I found, on someone’s blog, I think.  I haven’t used them, but now that I remember them, I’ll have to check them out again myself. 

http://burgessanimals.shutterfly.com/8

http://www.artprintsforkidz.com/burgess-animal-book-for-children/

http://www.thatresourcesite.com/printables_for_homeschoolers_colouring_burgess.htm

http://teachbesideme.blogspot.ca/p/burgess-animal-book-for-children-guide.html

http://www.mnh.si.edu/mna/main.cfm?lang=_en