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Narration Struggles
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Ok — I’m having trouble with consistancy with narration, and I’m not really sure how to go about correcting that yet. My older child generally does well with narration when he is genuinely interested, or if I keep the lesson VERY short. He does better narrating fiction than non-fiction. My younger (7) is struggling with it much more. It doesn’t help that I don’t always ask for it. Sometimes it depends on the length of the lesson. If it has been 15 mins and I feel I’m losing them, then I often move right on to something else without giving narration much thought. I am not requiring written narration at all yet (although yesterday I after our astronomy lesson I asked them to pretend they were on vacation on another planet and to write a postcard home. My older was very creative with it and wrote about the rings of Uranus being a Hover board park — and all the skating rinks on the icy planet. My younger wrote about being on Jupiter and getting caught in the storm that’s been going on for the last 300 years). There drawing narrations are extremely simple, and I do try to write under the picture their brief explainations. There seems to be a lot of subjects we don’t narrate — math, penmanship/copywork, grammar (we are doing Grammarland with the work pages that I down loaded. My younger will sometimes do them, sometimes not — depends on how interested he is, but he definately understands. It was quite interesting one day about two weeks ago — we were driving to the market and they were in the back seat talking about which adjectives best describe their new kitten, and analyzing their various sentences. I guess they are learning somthing). They are not doing a lot of independant reading yet. The subjects that we are doing that they should be narrating are: Science, Biblical Worldview, and eventually Canadian Social Studies (we are working on Canadian Geography right now). I haven’t really been requiring narrations at all for our literature read alouds, but every now and again I might ask them to draw their favourite seen in the book so far. It feels that most of what we do is reading a-loud, not enough hands-on.
How can I get to be more consistant with requiring narrations, and how can I incorporate more hand-on productive work? I’m not the most crafty person, and we really haven’t done much creative stuff. My older son has been doing some wood working with dad, but that’s about it. We are also struggling with getting any kind of nature study done. Suggestions,please?????
Hmm. You have lots of different issues here. Perhaps it’d help to focus on one at a time? What are all their ages again? You mentioned a 7yo. What age is the older child?
You want to STOP a reading and do a narration before you notice signs of losing attention. Charlotte Mason called narration “the act of knowing”–in some ways, what we read and DON’T act upon in some way is very fleeting in our memories. There will be a few things that strike a chord that we might remember, but by and large much of the reading I’ve done that I did not narrate I have lost. Kind of a sad thought when so many hours go into something! Narration is not something that you get to if it is nice–it is the glue that sticks your hard work to the child. Read less at a time if you must, but don’t skip the narration. If you have just two narrating after a reading, then alternate. One day, have one child narrate the reading; next time, next child. Sometimes you can have one child go “first” and tell what he learned and then have the other add in anything else he noticed; do rotate who goes first. Drawing and other methods are a nice change of pace, so are fun verbal activities like “give a news report” or your postcard one, but the meat and bones of your narration should be some variation of simply “Tell me about . . . ” or “What did you learn?” “What happened to . . . .” Very simple. Give your child some room to choose what is most important to him.
Subjects I had my 7-9 year olds narrate: Literature, history, science, fairy tales, Aesop’s if you haven’t done them yet (they are sort of Narration for the Inexperienced lessons, IMO) Bible readings. Things that are EASIEST to narrate—story-form things with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Tougher things to narrate: readings chock-full of facts strung together. When I was reading to both my older sons together, they would usually each have to narrate about twice a day; when they moved off doing all books together, each one would narrate probably 4-6 things per day. They were not always happy about this, but the proof in the pudding was at exam time. Even my younger son noticed that he did better on questions when HE was the one who narrated after that reading rather than just listening to his brother. All my children are now in the habit of narrating most of what they do, even if only to themselves at times (for example, the things they read for “fun”–they have learned if they make themselves journal/tell/teach it to someone else or even themselves, they remember it better.
The hands-on and nature issues are separate ones and I don’t have time right now to say much but hope you get some other input. Hands-on is not critical to me; we do a little bit, mostly food 🙂 and mostly as a dessert or special celebration of what we’ve learned. Nature study we love, but it’s gotten difficult with so many teens. Need to get out with my youngest more, in between all the stuff my teens need, but it’s been tough!
Good info Bookworm, thanks! I have noticed, too, that the factual science books are harder to narrate for my son. What do you (or anyone else) suggest to help with that? I thought of actually writing on a board some key questions to think through before reading and narrating these types of books. Would that be appropriate?
I forget to ask for their narrations more often than I’m willing to admit! I have bookmarks with questions on them to ask the children. So when I mark our place with the bookmark I’m reminded to ask for narration.
I never wrote questions but we did sometimes write down something important–a person’s name, a scientific name or vocab word, things like that, that they could use when they narrated it later.
Thanks Bookworm. And thanks Kristen, I like that idea about the question on the book mark — that might help me to remember a little more often at least. I guess I’m still struggling with understanding what to expect in a narration.
Today has been a bad day — neither my 10 year old, nor my 7 year old could settle into the Biblical Worldview llesson at all. I had to give up. For science we played an astronomy board game. It’s been difficult keeping all facts on all the planets straight. I think we’ll have to do some review this week before moving on to the next unit.
I knew HSing would be hard, but today has been down right frustrating for the most part. My oldest started the day by throwing a temper tantrum about how much “he hates Homeschool –it’s torture, yada yada yada”. He does this once in a while. Mostly I think he was over tired. PMS hasn’t helped matters. I figured it was better to stop for the day than to continue getting more and more frustrated with their inability to settle into the material today. I figured I was losing it when I threatened to get them work books for every subject.
What kind of worldview lesson are you doing? I have to confess that at age 7 we were just reading Bible stories. What facts on planets are you expecting them to remember? Are you expecting too much? I’m happy if my kids remember the names of the planets and just basic stuff, like which ones are the gas giants. We never really tried to learn tons of things about them. One fun thing we did to remember was to do the fun thing where a peppercorn is the small planet and a basketball is a big one and you spread it out down the street. We also made planets (NOT perfectly size-appropriate!) out of fondant and made a solar system cake. The kids got to eat Neptune. 🙂 There ARE days that are just frustrating. It’s OK to have them. Everyone will feel better hopefully tomorrow.
I agree, there are just some frustrating days that come with teaching kids and their natural childishness. Today, I felt myself wanting them to be serious about learning clouds in our 106 Days lesson, and of course they weren’t. Well, it ended up with them joking about riding up in the clouds someday to heaven! LOL! I had to just let it go and say, ” yeah, that WILL be a good day, won’t it? Can we go today? ” 🙂
Oh, but I will remember that as such fun one day in my old age!
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