Please help me write a paper on narration-need examples of it working

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  • art
    Participant

    I wondered if you all could help me out a little. I’m taking online classes, and I have to write a paper that uses examples to prove my point. One of the choices of topics is “an unusual study technique”. So I wanted to use narration.

    Facing facts–we stink at narration. I wouldn’t say there are examples from my homeschool that prove narration works. In fact, I need to start another thread about needing help with that some time.

    So if some of you who have seen narration work as a study (learning) technique could give me some specific examples, I would appreciate it a bunch.

    I am planning on also using some of the examples in the back of Charlotte Mason’s books. Maybe this paper can help me improve our homeschool in this area. Sometimes I think my kids don’t know anything at all.

    Thanks for the help

    Angela

    Sue
    Participant

    Well, here’s one for you. I’m not sure if this is exactly what you are looking for (because I often think we stink at narration, too), but I can relate to you what happened just a few days ago.

    My autistic 12yo ds gives me oral narrations because writing is so difficult for him (both rhetorically and physically). Sometimes, his narrations are lacking sufficient details to indicate that he has acquired more than just an overview of what we have just read. A conversation he related the other day proved me wrong.

    We had finished reading Sterling North’s “Abe Lincoln: Log Cabin to White House” about 2 weeks ago. I hadn’t thought much about it since, but a couple of days ago ds and I were driving to the grocery store, and he told me about a conversation his dad was having with another adult in the house. The assassination of a political figure had come up while the adults were talking, and dad turned to ds and asked if he knew what it meant to assassinate someone. Ds proceeded to tell his dad about the final chapter of the Abraham Lincoln book, and he repeated the details he gave his dad, along with a few other comments about earlier chapters of the book. I was astonished at the facts he recalled. It was one of those, “Wow, you really were paying attention!” moments that parents and teachers long for.

    I hope this story helps you. I have been pleasantly surprised to discover that my son enjoys history. As the parent of a special needs child, I look for “surprises” in my son’s education. Sometimes, we’ll visit places and see some artifact that relates to a time period we have studied, and he’ll recall that we read about it in a certain book some time ago. As we continue the comments of, “oh, yeah, that was the book that told us about….” he and his sisters begin to roll out more and more information contained in that particular book.

    Sue

    art
    Participant

    Sue,

    Thanks for the great story! That’s exactly what I was looking for. Did the story your son told you in the car repeat in any way an earlier narration, or was it something totally new because he had had a couple weeks to have it inside him and then he beautifully related that to the conversation his dad was having?

    I mean when you look back on his original narrations, would they indicate in any way to you that he would have made those later connections?

    Thank you so much

    Angela

    Sue
    Participant

    I’m not sure if it was any different because he and his sister take turns narrating orally during history. But because he is autistic, he varies in terms of how much he remembers long-term. I just remember thinking that, for him, it was a very positive thing that he could recall the details a couple of weeks later and relate them to someone other than merely through my prompting.

    I do recall that the details he gave–that Lincoln was sitting in a theater box in the balcony, that Booth shot him from behind then leaped to the stage and broke his leg, that Booth escaped and was captured in someone’s barn–all of these things were described in greater detail than his narrations normally are at the time of reading. Perhaps also his sister’s narrations help cement things for him, although her narrations occasionally aren’t all that great, and my son ends up correcting her or adding details. It’s strange….I ask him to narrate and it’s very limited. I ask her to narrate, and he often adds to hers.

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