Thanks for in advance for any feedback.
My oldest, turning ten in four weeks, is beginning written narration. Here is what I’m having her do, does this seem right? Should I make some changes?
We are using Beautiful Feet for American History and we are keeping a notebook with that, it has some copywork that go with the pictures. I read her the first 8-10 pages of the Leif the Lucky book by the D’Aulaires. She then sat and wrote her narration of what had been read. I told her not to be concerned about spelling or punctuation, the idea was just to get the words in her head on the paper. The next day we looked over it together and made corrections as I typed up what she had written. I typed it with correct spelling and punctuation (I think!) We discussed some things she did right, like beginning sentences with capitals and a few things to improve such as not beginning every sentence with the word, “so.” The following day she began copying her polished narration into her history notebook. She has worked on copying it each school day a little at a time, but it has taken almost 8 days to finish! She has other writing she is doing in her other daily work (cursive copywork, easy grammar, spelling you see), so I guess that’s why it’s going slowly.
My question: Is this slower pacing appropriate? By the time she does her next written narration it will probably be about the next person in history, so I guess it’s okay that she’s not writing a full paper on Leif, right???
Here is what she wrote, is this the type of thing I should be looking for from this age? (Not where she came up with “pushed out.” : )
Written Narration Leif the Lucky July 2, 2015
Eric the Red had a bad temper! He lived in Norway, but since he had such a bad temper, he got pushed out. So, he sailed to Iceland, but since he had such a bad temper, he got pushed out again! Then he sailed to a land and he called it Greenland. He thought it was a good place to live, so he went back to Iceland to get his family. He told stories to his friends, then they wanted to go to Iceland and they followed him to Iceland. A storm rolled on and Eric told his son, Leif, to climb up the ship and take the dragon head off the ship because he thought the spirits would be mad. The storm was so bad that some of the ships went home. Finally, they got there.
