evaluating narration for 6yo

I can only tell you what my 6 yo can do.  I have no idea if she is typical or not,  but maybe it will give you something to compare with.  She has been narrating for about a year (we started in the Spring).

What I expect from my DD’s narrations differs depending on what we are reading. 

She reads Aesop’s Fables by herself and then is able to tell me the fable with a fair amount of detail.  Sometimes she leaves something out so that I don’t quite understand what the story line was, but usually just a look of confusion on my face will trigger her to go back and add in the important part.  Since these are so short, DD will often repeat phrases directly from the fable, but she does it in her own style.

I  read “Boy of the Pyramids” aloud to DD while she draws a picture about something in the chapter.  Then she tells me the story, using the picture.  I try to write these down, so here is an example. 

From the chapter called “The Slave Market”, the picture was of the litter and the boat that they travelled in.  She told me:

Kaffe was going with his father to the slave market.  His father bought a father and a mother and Kaffe bought their little girl because he won the bid with another man, Anthotep.  Anthotep wanted the little girl to be a dancer, but Kaffe wanted her so she could be with her mother and father.  Then the 3 new slaves walked with Num.  Before they went home, Kaffe bought an Egyptian doll for the little girl.  They ate their meal and then Kaffe learned the little girl’s name, Sari.  They stood by the rail while the grownups chatted.  When they got home, Nasha said “Got some new slaves?” and Socaris said, “The little one, Kaffe bought all by himself.”  Nasha said, “What!  You let him buy a slave girl after your promise?”  Sari went to live in a house with her parents. 

Then we had a discussion about slaves and what she thought about that concept.

When we read “The Burgess Animal Book”, I don’t ask DD to narrate the whole story.  Instead I give her a prompt that asks about the animals that Peter Rabbit learned about.  DD usually gives me a brief answer, such as “He learned about ground squirrels and tree squirrels.”  Then I prompt again, asking things like “What was interesting about the ground squirrel?”  Or “How were they different?” or whatever suits the information.  Then DD is able to give me a few details about the animals in the passage, and we discuss it, relating it to what we already know from our own experience or from previous chapters.  Sometimes we look up information on the internet as well.

In some of the other books, I sometimes stop more frequently and ask for narration about short sections.   These narrations are usually more detailed, because they are in shorter chunks.  This gives her a chance to ask questions, as well.  I do this with books that may be more confusing.

As to how to help your son understand what you expect, I found that at the beginning it really helped for me to ‘team narrate’.  I would start with just a sentence or two to get her focused on the beginning of the passage.  Then I’d ask “Then what?”  Once she told me all she could remember, I’d continue adding a few details of my own, which usually got her started remembering more.

I think this way of modelling really helped her ‘get it’.  Another thing that helped was to ask her to tell the story to Dad later that day, and then let her know that was a narration, too.  So she got the idea that a narration is not just repeating back verbatim.  The method of drawing a picture and then dictation a narration to go with really works well.  Then she doesn’t just feel like she is telling me something I already know.  It also helps that she is able to read Aesop on her own, so she is actually telling me a story that I haven’t just read. 

Hope that helps a bit.

Joanne

My 6 year old’s narrations aren’t as detailed as the examples Joanne mentioned either. We are, however, still very new to narration. We did some very gentle practice using Aesop’s Fables and Arnold Lobel’s fables in November and December last year, but really only started narration in earnest about a month ago. At this stage I usually stop every 2-3 paragraphs and have her tell me what has happened so far, and then at the end of the selection, I have her tell me one thing she remembers or what her favorite part of the story was. At this stage, I usually only get a sentence or 2, and sometimes I need to prompt her a bit to get her going (Along the lines of “Okay, so this and this happened, and then what?”). Or if she really can’t tell me anything about the selection, I might narrate that chunk, and then prompt her again with the next portion of the reading and usually I get something then. Right now we narrate Bible, history, geography and nature study. Our nature study narrations are more observations like “tell me what you noticed about the tree” rather than what she remembers about something we read. These narrations tend to be a bit more detailed (maybe 4-5 sentences.) For history, she usually also colors a timeline figure and for geography she draws a picture in our “Year in France” book. I usually don’t have her narrate things she is reading for herself, at least not formally. Right now I am in school part time so she is often doing her reading practice (with the Pathway readers) with dh, so sometimes I will ask her informally later if she can tell me what happened today since I missed the story. I don’t ask her to narrate literature as this is something we do more as part of our family time than as part of our formal school time, and I don’t want to burn her out on narration before we get started. Honestly, I thought narration would be much more of a struggle for her than it has been – she tend to me more visual and has never been extremely verbal – so I am pleased with the volume that I am getting from her at this stage. I think expectations among children of the same age are probably going to vary quite a bit.

HTH,

Jen