Narration with teen

I’m not sure I’m the best one to respond but I’m happy to share what it looks like over here …

My children are 10 and 12 … They started CM at 7 and 9 years of age after having been in private school.  My advice … make sure you have it clear in your mind first.  It just helps it run smoothly and you’re not caught off guard by a question or challenge to this new method.  I started slowly and built up from there.  Sometimes it’s beautiful, rich and so CM.  Other times it’s less so.  But no worries, it does work! 

And don’t be afraid to create your own narration lists and cubes and such.  Sometimes you’ll know the best way to ask your children for a narration.  Sometimes you’ll find great narration ideas online too.  It’s good to have a vast treasure box of narration ideas.  Some days are good for one type and other days will lend themselves to something totally different.  The same goes with subject matter. 

Group or individual lessons …. we use narration in both areas here.  I started with only oral (I would have regardless of age) so that we all got up to snuff before they launched in to written narrations.  Now they do both in various subjects on various days.

Written narrations in my experience take time!  That drags down my day a bit when the type of writing skills I’m more interested in working on are different than those used in a written narration.  With that said, sometimes I can have them narrate in a way encompasses both.  I think this is an area I might differ from others on too.  On days I have writing assignments then oral narrations in other subjects prevail.

I should say we still do a majority of subjects together here.  I only have the two kids and it’s nice and more fun frankly to be a group!  That differs from a lot of moms with children this age.  Their children are probably working far more independently all day.  I don’t need that and so we still do everything but Math, Foreign Language, Literatures as a group but with understandable variations in expectations for their ages.

How much and how often depends so much on your children and your style of homeschooling.  I try to have mine narrate on several subjects covered each day in some way.  I haven’t thought about this in a while … I’m not sure now why I do this but it gives me a level of comfort.  In my mind I’m always shuffling who is narrating and how and in what subjects so that I feel at all times like they’ve “got it” but I never feel 100% relaxed about it.  That’s just me.  If there is some new or interesting way of thinking about how to “do” CM then I’m there and full of “hmms”  😉

Today my children narrated in these ways …

• Literature – orally to me, after they finished I had questions so that lead to some nice discussion/rabbit hole following (don’t always have them narrate in Literature to me orally thus the questions as I catch up!)
• Plutarch – we discussed as we went through and they offered a truncated sort of narration by hitting the major points from a paragraph that we’d then discuss a little more together; to finish they illustrated their favorite scene (we’re collecting/creating a little book of illustrations for Life of Dion)
• Shakespeare – honestly we sort of “talked through” this short scene today after they took turns reading it aloud, not sure that was the greatest but we’re still setting the stage in our mind’s eye for this play

Their other subjects were covered but not narrated on – Foriegn Language, Poetry, Jornaling, Spelling, Math.  Not that they would not lend themselve to narration, but they just were not slated for that today.  Right or wrong I’ve always considered narration a way of teaching another person something you know.  So for spelling practice they might come up with a list for me to spell to them.  Of course they’ve had to write the words, listen to me spell them, check me, correct me.  A great Math narration method – “Teach me how to do these problems.”  I like to ask questions after this narration to test specific skills or areas of understanding by pretending not to know a skill yet.

I am not an expert.  There are other folks on here who are much, much better!  I hope something in here helps.  Look at the old posts with “narration” in them too.  There are some good things there!  In fact I’ll do that too.  🙂 

LONG WINDED.  So sorry.  I kept working on other things and coming back to this and thinking of something more to say!!  Enough already, right?!