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Narrations vs answering questions
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I’ve had people tell me that kids need to learn how to answer questions. To learn to look back through the reading to find the answers. Yes, I have one who actually has a problem with knowing how to answer questions. If there is multiple choice, true and false etc. there’s no problem. If the question is worded differently than the way it was in the text, then they have a harder time. I mean, a really hard time knowing what the question is wanting from them for an answer. Same with an essay question. He doesn’t know how to answer it fully. He’s always afraid he’ll get it wrong. Wrong as in the answer key has a much more involved answer than his own. As long as he covered some of what the answer key had for the answer I had let his answer stand. Sometimes even the short answer questions have been difficult though. We’ve always used books for history & as we found out more, we added in the written narrations. They were always coming to me previously & talking about this thing or that thing they had read in their books, so I figured they were already used to orally narrating, though at the time we’d never heard of such a thing.
So, now we’re in the last year(s) of high school. Do they need to learn how to answer questions?? Have we messed up our kids by using narrations? I have a child who is resisting a particular curriculum because of having to answer the questions( NO. it’s not the ACE curriculum either).
No, I definitely think narration doesn’t mess up our kids. I think both narration and answering questions are both useful, narration moreso. Both are important skills to learn.
My oldest son had problems with short answer questions, too. In 9th grade science, he was doing some, and I had to make him do them over again a number of times because of incomplete answers, silly answers, etc. So then in 10th grade, his science course happened to consist of ALL short answer questions (I didn’t do that on purpose but it was what he needed). He did fine. I think he just needed the practice. He kept doing narrations, too.
I would work some short answer questions in somewhere just for the practice and knowing how to do them, in case those types of assignments are what he encounters in college, etc.
Master Books’ Survey of Astronomy. All of Master Books’ courses have a lot of short answer questions in them.
Yes! The Master Books’s Survey of Astronomy, that’s exactly what my 2 boys used this last year for there science. : )
What about the essay questions? Some history curriculum do have a few essay questions as well. I was also told as a suggestion, to find something that would teach the kids study skills(for test) and how to take notes. Where does that come in when using CM methods? Would that fall back into the Science curriculum one chose?
I have not specifically had my son answer essay questions yet. Perhaps I should think about covering that. However, he writes short essays all the time and lots of 3 paragraph narrations, so I think he has the skills to do it.
As far as notes go, I taught him last year how to take notes as part of writing. So for a while, I had him take notes from something once per week instead of a narration.
I did use Survey of Astronomy to teach study skills. It was the first year he wrote science tests and since they were all scheduled in the daily lesson plans, he knew when they were coming and he studied for them. I also had him follow the syllabus on his own since it’s so nicely laid out, so that was part of learning organizational skills, too.
I don’t know how these things fit in to a CM education, but I figured they were important so I found ways to work them in on my own.
As the student advances in narration skills, you should raise the bar in the types of narrations you ask from him. Part of raising the bar is giving him essay-type narration prompts. You can ask for a persuasive essay, a descriptive essay, an expository essay, a narrative essay. (Don’t get hung up on the word “essay”; it simply means a short piece of writing on a given topic.) If you read the article linked above, it will give you some examples of the types of questions Charlotte asked for upper-grade narrations.
As far as answering questions goes, we know that Charlotte encouraged us to avoid asking direct questions on the content. She felt that being able to put it the material into your own words was a more complete and self-guided way of learning. However, we know that some students need practice with that skill if they are planning to take college classes, where many of the courses are built around questions. That’s one of the reasons we recommend the Apologia and Jay Wile science courses for high school. The textbooks are still conversational, but the student can practice both putting the material in his own words (narrating) and the skill of answering direct questions.
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