When I say “now, tell me what we just read please”, I can get a variety of responses, and, I’m just not sure which I should be encouraging, and which I should be steering away from.
We began practicing narration by reading and narrating Aesop’s Fables. My son tends to narrate… almost verbatim, what we just read. If the word was “nag” he might say “horse”, or “chicken” for “hen” and so forth, but his narrations are usually nearly as long and as detailed as the original reading.
When we started with Aesop’s Fables, this was fine. 5 minutes of fable reading = 5 minutes of narration (maybe a minute to cover a new word or laugh about a funny point in the tale, etc), and I figured detail was a good trait of narration.
But, now I’m not so sure.
Now, 10 minutes of history reading = 15 minutes of narration, or longer if he’s really hung up on details, or does any backtracking to inject details he ommited, etc. Suddenly, we have a 30 minute history lesson on our hands, and by then we are both just tired! (Plus, I have a four year old and a one year old who are not often willing to give us 30 minutes of quiet! (And who can blame them?))
Should I encourage him to summarize a bit?
Should “… and her hair sparkled like sunbeams splashing amongst polished pebbles in a summer’s creek bed…” be closer to “her hair sparkled like water running in the stream” or “she had shiny hair” ?
If it’s “..He had 14 wifes, two of whom were his uncle’s daughters, and 32 children, and…” my son will often get caught up on these details and say “10 wifes – no it was 12 wifes… how many wifes did he have?”. Should I encourage him to simply say “he had many wifes and children”?
Also, for a seven/eight year old boy, is it alright if I’m prompting with questions? “Do you remember? He rode sommmmme sort of animal to get there….”?
Lastly, what about post-narration questions? Should I refrain from asking questions once he’s finished narrating? I’m torn between making sure he “caught” key elements, and criticizing or discouraging him.
I don’t have this problem yet, as we will start narrations of Aesop in June with my first grader. What I’ve done is make a narration cube. The template is on Penny Gardner’s website. Each side has a narration prompt, such as person, setting, or feeling. Before the reading I will roll the cube and tell him he has to tell me about that one thing after the reading.
Maybe that way he won’t have enough to narrate for 30 min! LOL
If he still wants to give you more, maybe he could put on a puppet show for his younger sibs. He’d have to plan the script and make the puppets, which would give you and the youngers a break.
To get him out of this verbatim habit, you might vary your narration requests with something like, “Pick your favorite part of this story – just one part – and tell me about it.”
Or mabye, “What’s the most important part of this reading?” You might even try, “If you had to tell someone in just a few words about this story before they hopped on a train leaving the station, how would you do that?”
Drawing a picture and writing a caption for it would instill editing skills, and perhaps acting out the story would do the same.
A little lesson in the flow of conversation and how to keep information interesting for the listener might be useful at this point. He might think it’s “better” to include all the details, not realizing that being able to edit as he narrates is a favor to the listener. I’m going through this lesson with my 11 yo daughter, who likes to give every plot detail in answer to the question, “what book are you reading?”
And all this just goes to prove what I have discovered since homeschooling using CM….narration is not as easy as it sounds!
Just had another thought…some tall tales might really interest him. Tall tales are such fun stories to narrate because they are crazy! This is a situation where the details are important….as long as they are funny. Any detail that slows down the story has to be tossed aside. Might be fun?
Good luck…sounds like you have a bright kid on your hands who has grasped the concept of paying attention. That’s wonderful.