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Written Narration Time
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We have been using SCM for 3 years now and are on our Ancient Rome year. My daughters are almost 13 and I am struggling with the narrations for For The Temple (and Beric the Briton before this). My daughter writes pages for her narration for each chapter but it takes her an hour or more in our day making history take most our mornings. Not sure what to do. Any suggestions appreciated.
I had this problem with one of my children last year so I changed the expectations of written narrations. This year I created a jar with short 10 minute narration questions to answer. Some examples are: Write one journal entry from the point of view of the main character, write a short note to _____ telling three new things you learned, describe one scene from your reading in a single paragraph, mimic this poem (I then have a very short poem from our term’s poet printed there) from today’s reading etc. Charlotte Mason usually followed timelines and I often found that my child would take as long as I would allow on the narrations, so I remedied that by setting a timer and having her stick to a shorter narration of good quality. I also occasionally do them alongside my child to demonstrate that it can be done in a short amount of time. Then once a week I give a longer narration question that can go 20-30 minutes. Everything else is orally narrated. This year has gone much better with narrations and there have been no complaints. I wish you well!
Are you asking her to “tell what she read” for her narrations? Or, are you narrowing the subject of the narration for her? The basic “tell me what was read” narration prompt is usually given to young children just starting to learn how to narrate. As children get better at narration, asking for them to narrate on a specific part of a reading helps to keep the narrations from being too long. Also, as children get older different types of narrations can be asked of them. The different types of narrations help the student to think at deeper levels and to write in different styles of essays.
Here are some examples of narration prompts Charlotte Mason asked of her students in the middle school grades:
- Explain [key phrase from historical event] and give an account of [related historical event read about].
- What do you know of [historical event read about]?
- Describe a journey in [geographical area read about]?
- Describe your favorite scene in [literature book read].
- Write twelve lines on [historical person read about].
You can also get ideas of different narration prompts by looking at the samples of our Narration Notecards.
Our article Raising the Bar from our Narration Q & A series will give you more information on the types of narrations you can ask and at what grade you can ask them.
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