Narration Cards

There are lots of things you can use as aids to narration, such as dice or ideas on paper slips in a jar. I thought I would try making and using some "Narration Cards". The idea is that after hearing a reading, J picks a card and answers the question or completes the activity on it. I wanted to be able to put the ones he has already done to one side so that we work our way through the set.

I found lots of ideas from this page: Narration Starters. I omitted the ones involving writing because we're not there yet (J is in Ambleside Online's Year 2). Here's what I chose:

1. Tell me all you remember about the story.
2. What did you like about the story?
3. No narration today!
4. Mummy narrates.
5. Draw a scene or character from the story.
6. Act out a scene from the story.
7. Describe ______. (A character or place from the story.)
8. Ask me a question about the story.
9. Make a model of a scene or character from the story.
10. Tell me something you didn't like about the story.
11. Make a short puppet show of the story.
12. Make a Lego scene from the story.
13. What does the story remind you of?
14. Pick a character: are you the same as or different from them?
15. Find a biblical truth in the story.
16. What do you think will happen next?
17. What would you do if you were in the story?
18. Why did ____________?
19. What do you think about _____________?
20. Do you agree with __________?

You can download these cards as a free PDF document below (2 x A4 size). There's a faint owl perched on some books in the background (J currently a huge Harry Potter fan!), courtesy of The Graphics Fairy.

Narration Cards.pdf by clarehandsfull

Ambleside Online Year One so far: Copywork

DS has always quite liked writing, more so than reading. He draws pictures and labels them (copying the words out of books) on his own initiative. The first writing I did with him was making an Alphabet book. We also did a calendar, following the ideas from Charlotte Mason Help.

Alphabet Book "O" 

Calendar

In June DS moved on to Penny Gardner's Beautiful Handwriting. It was a transition for him to have to form letters in the correct way, and he resisted somewhat. Funnily enough, we had a break over the summer and when we came back his writing had improved. I also bought a wipe clean alphabet board for easy practice. It works better if DS does it on his own without me hovering over him, so he does a few words a day independently, which is nice for me to be able to send him off to do that. I haven't worked out if it's better with a timer or a set amount of work. He can write quite nicely when he is really paying attention, which is of course a fundamental habit to establish. He is more likely to rush his work though at the moment.

Penny Gardner's Beautiful Handwriting

DS's finished the alphabet and individual words, so we are now on to sentences and copywork proper, which is another transition. There are a few sentences with Penny's programme, and then I will have to work out what to give him.

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Ambleside Online Year 1 so far: Artist Study

This has been going quite well. Following the Ambleside Curriculum schedule, I put the picture for the fortnight on the iPad home screen, and also print off some postcard size pictures of the work. These go up on the wall while we are studying the artist and then at the end of term they'll go into a photo album of all the artists and pictures we've done.

The first week the children would look at the picture for a time and then tell it back to me as best they could. I might also read something about the artist or picture. The second week we would get paints or another medium out and they would make a copy of it. These would go up on the wall. That's it! Very simple but pretty successful - we've really enjoyed this part of "school".

Ambleside Online Year 1 so far: Bible Study

To KJV or not to KJV? After reading this post by Kathy at Piney Woods Homeschool, I have decided to use a more modern version with the children at the moment, with perhaps some memory work from the King James Bible, and then read that with them as "literature" at a later date.

The Ambleside ladies have just posted a Bible readings schedule as part of their curriculum, which is really helpful. However, I'm not going to follow it as laid out, but rather adapt it so our weekly readings look like this:

Monday: Old Testament
Tuesday: New Testament
Wednesday: Psalms
Thursday: Proverbs
Friday: catch up with any missed, or children's choice of story.

At the moment we are using the International Children's Bible.

We also have a family Bible time which DH leads in the evening. At the moment he's reading through Leading Little Ones to God; we've also used The Catherine Vos Story Bible and the Big Picture Story Bible.

I really like Lindafay's ideas on Practical Ways to Cultivate Spirituality in a Child at Higher Up and Further In, and will try to incorporate them at some point.

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Ambleside Curriculum Year One so far

We started this very slowly over the summer. I was in the later stages of pregnancy (Dear Daughter 3 was born mid-November) and wanted to get into our stride, and at least have some semblance of a routine going before baby-madness took over. This is what developed, and seemed to work for us for that time.

Over breakfast: Bible and Poem.
Table time: Memory work (daily) and Artist Study (weekly). Also some habit training.
While I tidied up after breakfast and did some laundry: DS did Copywork and Phonics (Reading Eggs) pretty much independently.
At times grabbed throughout the day: children played quietly while I read from the Ambleside Literature selection. DS would then either narrate or draw a timeline picture.

That's basically it. I will write in a bit more detail about what worked well, which unfortunately won't include Composer Study, Nature Study or Hymns/Folksongs, which we got to only very infrequently. Must try harder!

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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