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What do you use for written narration assignments?
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This question has probably been asked many times but…..I would love to know what others do for kids still in the beggining stages of written narration. I am planning on bumping up my dd 12 to written narration 3x per week when we start back in July.
Also, for those of you doing written narration daily do you just vary the subjects like history one day, science the next day, etc?
When my oldest started written narration, we transitioned by me typing his first “written” narrations for him, with him gradually typing more and more on his own. (This son doesn’t like pen & paper writing, so we also used this time for him to brush up on his typing skills.)
When he listened to an audio book that particularly inspired him, he was ready to do a written narration all on his own – he was that excited to re-tell the story. I wouldn’t rush, though. Give it at least a good semester before your DD takes over entirely.
My 12YO DS does 2-3 written narrations each week on his private blog. Usually one is history-based, one is on another subject (science, literature, or a Boy Scout merit badge requirement), and one is about something current in his life (a field trip, sport or other activity, or something interesting he’s been reading about in the news). My son loves history, which is why he writes lots of narrations in history. If he preferred science, I would give him more narrations in science instead.
I have my 4th and 5th grader do written narration at least once a week. Sometimes twice. Usually from whatever book they are reading, but I did just purchase a writing curriculum based on the history that we are learning and that has some short stories that I am having them use.
Bumping this up b/c I have the same question. My 4th grader just turned 10, and she is ready to start written narration. I thought about using whatever she is reading on her own, but would I just select a day in the week for her to write her narration? I don’t was going to start with one day each week.
What subject is good to start with? History? Literature? She is already doing notebooking with science from Apologia, so we won’t do that.
She gives good oral narrations, and is not looking forward to writing as much as she tells orally. Should I start with her giving me an oral narration while I type it? Or should I give her paper and pencil and see what she get out on her own?
I just give my daughter (grade 4) the list of her readings for the week and she chooses when she wants to read each day and which she wants to do as written narration. I think a general rule of thumb is to start with one per week, and then each year add one more per week. DD loves writing, so she started doing 1 each week last year, and is doing 2 or 3 each week this year. She varies the subjects that she does written narrations for. Some books might be easier than others, but I think it’s good to get experience with all different types of reading.
She also has the option of typing or handwriting. She does most of them typed, and gives much more detailed narrations when she does. She does like to do some in a notebook, however, so she gets the handwriting practice as well. She has a thing for notebooks!
It is normal for narrations to be shorter when written. If your daughter is concerned, you could give her the option of writing the first part and then narrating the rest orally. You could ask her to write for a specific amount of time (10 minutes, maybe?) and then continue orally, with you acting as scribe if she wants to have it all on paper.
For what it’s worth, my son in grade 2 has started volunteering to do the occasional written narration. He has done 3 so far this year. There is no way he would do it if I expected him to do it by hand, but he learned to type this summer, so he does them on the computer. He prints well and does copywork without problems, but wouldn’t be able to think about the narration if he had to concentrate on printing skills at the same time.
All the small steps add up, so I don’t mind letting them focus on one skill at a time at this stage. We’ll get to longer, more frequent, handwritten compositions as we go along.
I haven’t been as consistent with CM methods as I should have been and we’ve bounced around a lot in the area of writing. I’ve always been big on copywork, living books and oral narrations but have fallen behind in written narrations.
This year, I decided to go whole hog with CM methods so I decided to start slowly with my daughter even though she’s 12 years old. I started the first term with 1 written narration per week, every Friday. I allow her to pick the topic but try to encourage her to switch subjects here and there so that we have a nice variety of narrations in her portfolio. Since, my daughter is older and a good writer, I’ve decided to move things a long a little more quickly than I would with a younger child. We will switch to 2 narrations per week in our second term of this year. I may add in a third narration per week in the third term.
Once she is doing 2 written narrations each week, I plan on having her write one narration per week on science and one on history. I also have her write one a narration on the biographies of each of our composer studies and our artist studies for the year. Since we only do one per term, they will only add up to 6 narrations this year.
Melanie — with your artist/composer bio narrations, is that based on a single short bio of the person, or bio info from mulitple sources over the course of a term, or what? I know you haven’t started that part yet, but I’m just curious. Thanks in advance!
Actually we are already doing the artist/composer written narrations. It’s really a simple thing to add in since it only makes up two of my daughter’s written narrations per term. I use the biographies included with the SCM picture portfolios (LOVE these!) for our artists. For composers, I just look up a short bio online. The shorter bios work really well because it makes the written narration more like a short essay on the artist/composer instead of just a snippet from a larger biography. We read the bio the first week of the term (on the assigned day for that topic) and then she writes her narration.
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