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Writing CM style
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Can someone please tell me why summarizing would be a bad thing, and why CM prefers the whole narration as opposed to other methods that tell you that summarizing into the most important details is what is really needed to learn how to write a good paper?
Also, what do you do with a fourth grader who gives excellent narrations, but is not quite ready to write down his whole narration? Do you write it out and have him copy only part of it? All of it? Any of it?
Thanks for any information/help that you can help me with!
Dee
I’m not sure what Charlotte Mason would say exactly, but to me narration is building the child’s ability to recall information. It solidifies in their minds as they are retelling it to someone else. Summarizing is an important skill to learn, and as the student gets older, that must be developed. However, they need to be able to understand the finer points of a story, for instance, before they can discern which are the more valuable points to write down. My younger students have been known to want to just give me the ‘end of the story,’ calling it a summary, when they really are just being lazy and not listening.
I type as the child dictates. For very young ones, I leave a blank here and there for them to fill in for copywork. For older ones, I type as it is dictated and then we go over it for grammar instruction, word choice, that sort of thing.
Blessings,
Cindy
Good points, Cindy. I’ll add a few other things that Charlotte said we could do with a passage (taken from Vol. 3, p. 180). These things would be based on the child’s ability to listen to and remember the details first. Once he has the habit of reading for instruction and can comprehend the details after a single reading, he can then use all that information in his head to do some or all of the following.
- give the points of a description
- give the sequence of a series of incidents
- give the links in a chain of argument
- enumerate the statements in a given paragraph or chapter
- analyse a chapter
- divide it into paragraphs under proper headings
- tabulate and classify series
- trace cause to consequence and consequence to cause
- discern character and perceive how character and circumstance interact
- get lessons of life and conduct
One suggestion for making the transition into written narration: have the child dictate his narration to you orally as you type it or write it. When he starts winding down, say, one or two sentences from the end, stop writing and have him finish it in writing. You can gradually shift the amount of writing each of you do. As you progress, you can stop writing sooner and have him do more of the writing, until eventually he is ready to tackle writing the whole thing.
Thank you so much, Cindy, and Sonya. I’m going to start writing out half or most of his narrations and have him write out the rest of it.
This week, he gave me a really good written narration which he wrote out with much joy and enthusiasm, but it had lots of punctuation errors and capitalization errors. How do I go about correcting those without killing his love of writing it all out? Do I ignore these and wait for copywork to improve them? Do we go over them afterwards, fixing them together? Or do I make him re-write out the narration? (He is 10)
Thank you so much for the responses! I do have the new language book on my wish list and plan to get it really soon!
In Him,
Dee
Don’t worry too much about those errors during this transition phase. As you mentioned, you don’t want to discourage his enthusiasm of getting his thoughts down on paper. It takes a lot of effort to capture those thoughts and get them to flow through his pencil! You’re also right to give him time to notice punctuation and capitalization in his copywork and reading.
Once he has gotten comfortable capturing his thoughts in writing, you can start addressing improvements one or two points at a time. So maybe you could focus first on starting each sentence with a capital letter. Once he has mastered that point in his written narrations, you might focus on ending punctuation. Then you might move on to dialogue punctuation or something like that. But always one or two points at a time so he doesn’t feel overwhelmed.
Just today he filled up a whole page just because.Viewing 6 posts - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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