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Narration…blank??
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Has anyone had this issue?? What to do??
I’ve been practicing narration with my 2nd & 5th grader. When I ask them to narrate, my 2nd grader does so, but when I ask my 5th grader majority of the times he tends to say he “needs me to ask questions first.” He is blank and doesn’t know how to narrate. Sometimes when I do ask questions, he can’t answer the questions. I make sure that I ask open-ended questions, but sometimes I get little to no response from him. To be honest, this can be frustrating for both him & myself…For our lessons, I mentioned to him that I may have to let him narrate after each page versus waiting until the end of the chapter, but he was not fond of this idea…
He doesn’t like narration. He appears to be frustrated with the idea of narration and prefers to have questions asked, but sometimes even when I do ask questions he struggles with giving me the answers. I want this to be a pleasant experience for him, but so far it’s a struggle. On one hand I have one child that does it well and on the other I have one that’s struggling.
I know we’ve started late in the stage with this method (due to this being our first year homeschooling) so I feel like we’ve missed the earlier years and seems a little more difficult for him to develop an understanding of how to narrate…
Where should I start with him?
What are some key points that I need to keep in mind as the teacher/mother with teaching & learning narration??
Thank you.
Another thing that I needed clarity on…Is narration used as a means of learning reading comprehension? The reason I ask is sometimes I can’t tell whether he doesn’t understand what’s being read or if he doesn’t know how to narrate or explain (verbalize) answers to questions that he knows.
I know I’m asking a lot, but as you can probably tell this is concerning me…I want to make sure that I give myself time and have a balanced approach with learning CM Methods and not allow the process to overwhelm/frustrate me.
Hi Vanessa! 🙂 This problem could stem from several different issues. Your son may not be an auditory learner. He may struggle to pay attention when you are reading aloud. He may do better if he reads the book to himself.
Or-this could be a habit of attention issue. In that case, going down to one page or so before narrating would help.
Reading comprehension is certainly an integral part of narration. If he isn’t comprehending, narration will be impossible.
I would test him by having him read to himself and then narrate first. Then I would try reading a shorter passage aloud and seeing how he narrates afterwards.
Lastly, does he struggle narrating all of his books or just one in particular?
Thanks Melanie! I usually have them narrate what I read…for our history lesson and casual reading together (read aloud). He sometimes struggles with some… it depends….I’ve seen times where he’s able to, but with this lesson (book for history) he does so so. It may be the book…?? I will try him with another book and see what happens…as suggested I will shorten the passage and see how he responds.
If he’s struggling to narrate a certain book, it may very well be the book and not your son that is the issue. Poorly written books, textbooks or slow moving books usually do not produce good narrations. Sounds like it’s time to switch your history book to me. I tried a popular CM touted history curriculum once with my daughter and the quality of her narrations dropped dramatically. I switched back to truly living history books and her narrations improved immediately.
I have a question about this, too. My oldest is 8. When I ask him to narrate, it’s not that he doesn’t know what we read, he’s just silly in his responses and gives responds with phrases rather than sentences. For example, we are reading about the exodus and he’ll say things like, “drowned” or “went to desert” or “bad guys followed” but he doesn’t actually tell me the story. But, if it’s a movie he watched or maybe a book his dad read to him, he’ll tell me enthusiastically what happened and do a good job narating. What should I do?
If it were me, I would sit him and down for a talk about why we do narration and what I expect from him. Then I would gently encourage when it’s time to narrate. I’m sure his narrations will improve with time.
Both of my children went through periods where they felt self conscience about narration. I just did the above and they began to realize how valuable narration is and why we use it in our homeschool.
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