Starting narration late…

HI Kelly,

I hesitated to post my answer because it is not truly CM.  However, since no one else has responded, I’ll go ahead.

 We have been using the Writing with Ease series from Peace Hill Press.  It truly walks you and the child through the process of narration and dictation, with some copywork thrown in.  We love it here.  There are extensive samples available on the peacehillpress.com website.  For my 10 and 11 year old, I bought book 3  to start with.  They have dramatically improved on their written narration and dictation.  We are about to start week 12.  For my 8 year old, I started with book 2.  Honestly, you could do all this on your own, but having these books has made ME be consistent.  I am a checklist kind of a person so having the lessons to move through and being able to check them off is what motivates me to continue.  And as we all no, if mom isn’t motivated, the children certainly won’t be.  The added benefit is that through the selections in these texts, my kids are exposed to books they haven’t read before and they become interested in them and check them out from the library.

For oral narrations, they only narrate from one book at a time, not every book they read.  Right now they are doing Abe Lincoln’s World by Genevieve Foster.  They read one passage per day and then narrate to me.  As far as narration, that is all we can do right now because of my younger kids needing more attention from me on their schoolwork.  They also make notebook pages from their science reading.  They do these with no input from me, just putting what they find important or interesting.  This is also a form of written narration.  

I have found that doing these few things is very simple, easy to implement, quick, and my kids have improved by leaps and bounds in a short time just since adding in these things.  

Oh, I just remembered one other thing that they do.  They all have a different novel going that I assign to them to read.  For each chapter, they are to write a very short summary in their notebook, along with any quotes that they find compelling.  This is written narration.

I did not introduce all of these things at once.  We have been doing the oral narration for a couple of years, the Writing with Ease since this summer, and the notebooking pages for several months.  The novel summations, I did not introduce until last August.  

Here is an older post about starting narration with older children.  http://simplycharlottemason.com/scmforum/topic/narration-for-high-schoolers-who-are-new-to-it  You still want to start with small passages and oral narration untill they get the hang of it and then move on to longer passages and writen narration.  It may take some time as it is a skill and a hard one to learn at that.  But it is definately worth the effert.

@pslively,

LOL, I flew through your post so quickly that I didn’t even notice the error….so then I just HAD to go back and find it! I have a bad habit of clicking “Send Post” and then proofreading, so I’m always editing typos, too. (Why are those errors so embarassing to me???)

I am glad you suggested Writing With Ease, and I’m going to have a look at it. I, too, was very lax about requiring narrations, especially last year. Most of the time, I just asked for oral narrations, and not consistently. So, don’t feel too bad about your situation, Kelly. As I planned for this year’s work, I decided that I really needed to have my 9th grader work her way up to a lot more written narration, and I am just starting to have my 6th grader do written narrations. (DD12 did little written narration last year, and they were pitifully small paragraphs with frequent misspellings and light on details.)

The older one just doesn’t like to write narrations, although I believe she is quite capable since she often writes short stories and is working on a chapter book as well. The younger one simply sits there and doesn’t know what to write. She wants to look back in the book while she is writing. However, her oral narrations of two or three paragraphs are quite good.

Thanks for the suggestions.

I also found a link there to a pdf with diagnostic evaluations to decide where to start with Writing With Ease.

http://wtm-pdfs.s3.amazonaws.com/wwe/wweevaluations.pdf

Corie, i’m confused — did you use the workbook without the text?  How effective is that? 

I would say that WWE takes us about 5-10 minutes per kid per day, closer to 5 minutes most of the time.   There are 4 days scheduled per week.  They do not work on the same passage all week, but they do work on passages from the same book all week.  I know that the lessons will take longer as the passages get longer.  I purposefully chose book 3 for my older’s because the dictation passages were shorter and simpler, and that’s where I felt they would need to ease into it.

Regarding the workbook and text…  I did not buy the Writing with Ease book that you, as a parent, are to read and then make your own lessons from.  The workbooks have the lessons already made for you.  The text is for if you want to make the lessons yourself using your own literature selections.  We use these workbooks only:  http://www.amazon.com/The-Complete-Writer-Workbook-Writing/dp/1933339292/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1351364190&sr=8-1&keywords=writing+with+ease+2  In other words, you can just buy one or the other, not both, unless you just want to read the text so that you understand the “why” behind the lessons.  Once you get past level 4, the series changes to Writing with Skill, and then I believe there is a parent book and a student book that are both necessary. 

The front of the book has the lesson-by-lesson plans for the teacher to read from.  The back of the book are student pages that you tear out for the student to write upon, and their reading selections are also in these pages.  My kids do not write on these pages because I don’t want to tear up the book.  They write in a separate composition book each day.  

I did watch a video on youtube a while back that was Susan Wise Bauer doing dictation from Writing with Ease with her own son.  It was quite freeing and refreshing for me to watch her actually going through a dictation lesson with her son.  I think the videos would be helpful for any mom who is doing dictation, even those who would bristle at a classical education proponent like SWB.    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9fXrQVOOo8

She also has a question and answer series on youtube where she talks about Writing with Ease.