New to Narration

You have great questions!  One place you will find a lot of help is Simply Charlotte Mason’s blog.  They have kindly archived it for us a few ways.  When you hover over the “Learn & Discuss” tab above one option is Learning Library.  When you click on that it will give you several options for viewing past blog posts by topic, by series, etc.  In this case you want to click on Article Series.  There you’ll find at least two series all about Narration.  The first one is 5 Steps to Successful Narration and has 5 posts.  The second is further down the series list and called Narration Q&A and has around 18 posts.  I always would begin with the 5 Steps set!

You might even want to look at the series called Making the Transition to CM!

Now, for my own personal answers to your questions:

Charlotte had them narrating just about everything.  That doesn’t mean you have to, or that every family does.  And as you start I would suggest you don’t have them narrate every subject, ease them into it.  At my house (8 kids from high school down to toddler) I generally have the kids narrate:

• science reading or experiments
• history reading (both on their own or our family read aloud)
• their individual literature reading

I do not have them narrate the family read aloud we do for book club (Peter Pan this month).

With kids a variety of ages I do a mix of oral and written narrations.  With your specific kids ages I would begin with only oral narrations and then when they are comfortable with that and doing well try asking for one written narration in an entire week.  Only one.  You can work up from there slowly.  I have a 4th and 5th grader each this year and one does 1 written narration a week while the other does 1-2.  If my older one was more into writing things down I could require 3, but he’s not, so I don’t.

Yes, narration will ultimately happen multiple times a day, but it doesn’t have to be ‘obvious’.  If they voluntarily start telling you about a book they read or person in their history they are interested in, or science topic that caught them – great!  Listen well, consider asking one gentle question afterward if they are really brief, but if they are not, just leave it alone.  If you need a narration for history and it is a book you’re reading aloud to both of them together ask one to remind you all what happened last time you read (they’re narrating!) and then after a few paragraphs or a page ask the other to tell what’s going on or what they think about ______, or why they think someone did _______.  You get the idea, I’m sure!