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My children dislike oral narration!
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My children give me a very hard time when I ask them to narrate. I believe it is a good method for learning and thinking, but it doesn’t seem to be working. They sometimes just refuse to say anything. I’m not sure if it is a behavior issue or if they find it too hard – am I going about it in the wrong way? Should I keep trying or just give it up? Are my children the only ones like this? Do other children actually like to narrate?
Julie
I do not know the ages of your children, but have you tried the narration box or jar idea? That is a big hit at our house with my 8 and 9 yr. olds. My son asked if we could call it THE WISDOM BOX instead of THE NARRATION BOX. LOL!
I just have a small tin box with a lid (it has a snowman on top of it because we got some Christmas cookies in it as a gift last year, so any box or jar will do 😉 It is filled with narration suggestions on little slips of paper. The kids draw out one after reading or being read to. They really like the variety of the box. You can get ideas to put on your paper from the SCM narration idea link.
Yes, how old are your children? Is this their first attempt at narration? It is harder than it seems. I started my children off narrating from Aesop’s Fables. They are very short and mostly with one scene in the story. They were very successful at these, and success for them meant they liked it. We worked up from there with story type reading (as opposed to informational readings -which are the hardest to narrate).
And, no, my children didn’t just love narration, but it was something we did and they got used to it and do it without complaining now.
I don’t have any magic words but I will tell you this – push through and it gets easier. I have a first grader and we have been at it about 3-4 weeks now. He still doesn’t like it but just today he is seeing the benefits of it. At lunch we were just chatting about school and I just ask him to tell me about different things we had talked about and he was even surprised at how much he remembered. He got really excited that he almost narrated those stories back to me perfectly. We had a little chat at that moment about why narration was so important and that it is so hard because you have to think really hard. But today he got to taste the rewards of his hard work and it was quite encouraging.
I hope it gets better.
Amy
Thank you for the replies and ideas. My children that are formally in homeschool are 13, 10, 8, and 7. We have been doing oral narration for about 3 or 4 years but not real consistently. I have it on the schedule to do certain days during the week, but I actually forget or don’t get to it alot. I think I do need to shorten the amount of reading before the narration for my younger ones. My 10 yr old said she would rather do written narration. I know the information I’ve read on narration says to wait until the child is proficient in oral narration before starting written narration. I think my 10 yr old could use more practice at oral first, but would there be any harm in letting her go ahead with the written narration now?
The narration box sounds like a really good idea. I’ll have to try that!
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