Narration

NARRATION is so key to a "Charlotte Mason" education, and I have not got to grips with it at all. Possibly because Dear Son (7) is naturally resistant to being asked to do anything (loves swimming but hates swimming lessons, for example). My first attempt at asking him to narrate was a disaster. I'd waited until he was six-going-on-seven, as a child under six shouldn't be asked to narrate. I knew to do it in small chunks, but after paragraph after paragraph of the first chapter of Our Island Story, DS was bored, and frustrated, and it was ruining the story for him. After that he protested loudly and huffed and puffed, so I let narration be for a time.

Narration is so important because it is through retelling, in their own words, the parts of the story that have grabbed them, that a child makes the information their own. It becomes part of their grasp on the world, and is there ready to be connected to other things that come their way. It is simple, and effective, and eliminates the need for revision and testing. It improves memory, and vocabulary, and the all important skill of sifting information in order to get to the crux of the matter.

So, I am determined that we will get the hang of it. We had another bash and it went better. I tell DS that this is going to be a "listening story" (as opposed to a free read) before we start. If I don't, he insists that he can't remember a thing because he wasn't warned! I read a chapter from the Ambleside Online selection, and ask him to tell the story back to me. I'm pretty sure he doesn't see the point, but every so often I get a good response. I know I should make the passage shorter, a paragraph rather than a whole chapter, but then I'm not sure how we would get through all the books! I will work on that though. Perhaps I could ask him to narrate the first paragraph, and then read the rest of the chapter as a free read, slowly working up to bigger chunks. Miss Mason said that a reading that wasn't narrated was a wasted reading, but I have to view this first year as a building block to all the others, and I think developing the art of narration is the most important thing.

I thought I would include this here as hopefully I'll be able to come back in a while and say that we've improved, and let you know what worked for us.

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