Mmm, I hope someone more experienced chimes in. While we both wait for that I can share what we are doing:
Winging it. Yep. I didn’t think you would find that helpful. And honestly a large portion of our narrations are still oral even with Makayla (9th grade, 14 year old). She will do written narration when I ask and in history she tends to do more written narrations than in literature or science.
Really, we do a mix of things. I’m trying really hard to read the books before Makayla and be able to knowledgeably come up with those more than “tell me what is going on” narration questions. We also are planning a socratic discussion for each of her assigned lit books (so not everything, just lit) and I’m using the series of questions in Teaching the Classics for that so I have a set of basic questions that then have subquestion possibilities for deeper discussion. The other thing I’m doing is listening to her retelling of the story narrations and allowing those to prod me into coming up with a new question based on what she has found important. So when she mentioned today that she found Pickett to be a character that she didn’t like, even though he was one of the protagonists in The Green Ember and did make positive changes over the course of the book I asked her to tell me what first impressions can do, good or bad, in real life or in books. How had she seen that play out in other places or in other books she had read?
