Written narration – middle/Jr. High

P.S. I’m putting everything in spiral-bound notebooks this year. The boys will each have a spiral notebook to keep their written work in (just like for copywork and math 5-A-Day drills in their respective notebooks). I am making them myself and then having them bound at FedEx office, mainly so I can make my leftie notebooks with the spirals on the right. He told me the spirals really bother him on the left and earlier in the year asked me if he could use his spiral notebooks upside down (so the spiral is on right).

He is the type of kid who can be EASILY distracted greatly by something like this, so I’m happy to find a solution and I kind of like making my own notebooks b/c I can have a lot of creative freedom. I’m thinking in the narration notebooks, I will put a page at the beginning with narration starters in case they get stuck. Then no excuses, right?!

LDIMom, That’s a great idea about the spiral binding.  My leftie complains of the same thing so I started hole-punching on the right side and it helped a lot with the hand writing… =)

Misty, notebookingpages.com just added an app that will let your child pick his paper design, type in it, add pictures and print it out.  

Even if you don’t use their app – maybe you could add something like that to your schedule on say T and TH – “written narration in science or history (or whatever)” and let them choose what to type and a picture (either drawn or printed off the computer) to help them want to “remember” to do it too.  Just something to make it more interesting.  

My dc are 11, 12 and 13.  Answering your questions:

1) No, this is not copywork.  Copywork is copying from a well written book, noticing the spellings, punctuation, and capitalizations while copying.

2)They can surely type their narrations.  I wouldn’t have them do it if it is so arduous that they are spending more time finding the letters than getting their thoughts down, however.  Then they need a few more typing lessons before using it for narrations.

3)I would start the year at 1 per week and go up from there through the year.  It would depend how difficult this was for my child, how often I would require it.  If they are getting the hang of this and doing them without too much “suffering” I would go up to daily narrations.  The 11 year old maybe to 2-3 per week.  Depends how they do with them, really.  My 11 year old has much less difficulty writing things down (a girl) than my oldest boy.  So I have him doing less of this than her. 

4)I’d expect at least a paragraph.  In my experience it is harder to summarize the whole reading in a shorter amount than to write it all out.  It’s a harder skill.  But writing it all out takes more time and more writing  (not popular with boys)  If you want a paragraph summary, you may have to discuss this a bit and help them decide what are the main things.  And, yes, we go sometimes correct the work. Not every one though.  I have some narrations that are for this purpose and some that are “what did you learn” type narrations.  I’m interested in content more than correctness.