Getting a Child to Do the Work with CM

I am looking forward to moving into more of a Charlotte Mason approach for next school year. Currently we are eclectic and for our content subjects we use a read aloud and talk about approach, with some notebooking activities added in. For skills subjects, we have used texts and workbooks. With these, after I assign my 3rd-grade daughter her work, I can go off to teach my Kindergarten daughter and my 3rd grader is busy. Now with a Charlotte Mason plan, workbooks are greatly reduced, it seems, yet this appears to shift the balance, in the younger years, to a lot of teacher involvement. As I see it, picture study, composer study, reading aloud, dictation, nature study, and narration require the teacher’s full-time involvement. What can I do to make sure my daughter is actually working when I am not there guiding? (To be honest, I am planning to still stay with Rod and Staff phonics, spelling, and an English curriculum, for this reason. And math of course. I do plan to get ride of our reading curriculum. Is there a better way?)

There is some independent reading, maybe a lot of independent reading by fourth grade. However, this assumes that the child is doing a conscientious job of actually reading the material, something I do not believe my daughter does. That is why I have read nearly all of her content material to her, because I knew she would race through it, probably skipping a good deal, and thus not get the benefit of it. Requiring the child to read the material themselves can work if they child can give a high-quality narration, but my daughter does not do that either. At times we have to deal with resistance or silliness and giving very short, poor-quality narration that would not be equivalent in educational value to filling out a worksheet page on the material. All I can foresee, is that if I throw out reading a science book and going over the questions in the book, and merely have her read something and narrate it, a lot of the educational value is going to be lost. If I ask her to read a nature book, and do not have specific comprehension questions to hold her accountable, I may get a short narration that will not even tell me whether she read all the material. I understand there is a learning curve with narrations, but I do not want to lose a year’s worth of academic material due to sloppiness and laziness while we are trying to hone this skill. What do you recommend?