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Sara
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| Posted: Aug 15 2014 at 9:06am | IP Logged
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Ok, I have tried to read as many old posts on narration before asking my questions. I am sorry if I am being redundant!
I started narration last school year with my oldest daughter. I found this thread to be very helpful used most of the techniques in it. I would read a paragraph or two and have her narrate. Luckily, my daughter is very verbal and is natural narrator. My first question is: Do you record their oral narrations? I started doing that last year until I realized that others did not. We liked seeing her narrations all written out, but it does not seem like I could keep that up with multiple children.
My other question is about different forms of narration. I keep seeing suggestions for narrations (acting, drawing, etc.), and I wonder how these mesh with the original post I linked to above. It seems like those form of narrations would only be compatible with reading a complete story or chapter? Reading a page, drawing, reading another, drawing, seems a bit cumbersome. However, last year I would have my daughter draw a picture after I read a fairy tale. I pretty much got the same castle drawing every week even though I knew she remembered the whole story. So how do you do systematic "telling back" drawing? What about notebooking pages?
As aside, I watched Eve Anderson’s DVD and it was really helpful for me. My children are close in age so I would like to do a lot of group narrations in the future. However, I would like to mix it up a little bit, especially for my second daughter who is very artistic.
Finally, my first daughter is a strong reader so I would like her to do some of her readings independently this year. How do you make this transition?
Sorry this is so long! My main questions are: How do you do other forms of narrations? How do you switch from read-aloud narrations to independent reading narrations? I am sure I am over analyzing things a bit - I am just a newbie:)
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SallyT
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| Posted: Aug 15 2014 at 11:29am | IP Logged
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For us, especially in the younger years (up to 3rd or 4th grade), I've often not *formally* asked for any kind of narration on a given day's reading, but just watched to see whether it came up spontaneously in anything my kids did. Sometimes it would, sometimes it wouldn't. But especially when something had really caught someone's imagination, I'd catch that child drawing, or playing, some aspect of the story (usually it would be a story, like a scene from an historical novel).
Even with older kids, narration sometimes take the form of casual dinner conversation, or in-the-car conversation. Right now I'm reading the Gary Blackwood Shakespeare Stealer/Shakespeare's Scribe books to my 10-year-old (and my 12-year-old, although he's going to great lengths to make me think he's not listening, like closing the door to his room, for example, when I'm sitting in the upstairs-hall reading nook). The other day in the car, the 10-year-old and I had an extensive conversation about the Black Plague, which figures prominently in the second book, and parallels with the outbreak of ebola in Africa, because we also follow the news.
So, doing some formal narration to establish the habit -- including recording it so that the child sees that this act of composition translates into writing -- is important. BUT you don't have to do that for every narration. Every single reading does not have to be followed by a formal narration (here I may depart a little from CM -- not sure, but this is probably my unschooler underbelly showing!), and you may find that some readings will narrate themselves, so to speak, in that children will take the lead in processing them.
One other thought -- long before I knew anything about CM, or was Catholic, for that matter, I taught Faith Formation in an Anglican parish that used the Godly Play model for their education (in fact, the current leading world expert in Godly Play was my friend and the FF supervisor!). In that model, you would present a Biblical narrative or other lesson to the children, and then after some open-ended questions about it ("I wonder" questions), provide them with the means to "play" a response. There's an obvious parallel to Catechesis of the Good Shepherd here, and this is in some ways the model for Godly Play, although the "play" is much, much more open-ended than a Montessori "work," I think. The whole concept is far less scripted, and as far as I know, after many years, does not have the same kinds of clear catechetical goals in mind, so I'm not saying all this to recommend Godly Play, necessarily.
Here's what I'm getting at, though: I typically opted to let kids draw/color for a while after the story. I never said, "Now, let's draw a picture of what we just read," or anything as directive as that. I just gave them paper and art supplies and let them go, though we often had further conversations as they drew.
I think, looking back at all this through my CM lens, I instinctively drew back from implying that there was a right way to draw what we had read about, or that I had particular expectations about what they would draw, with the story in their minds. One kid in my class, for whatever reason, drew a pizza every week. When I mentioned this to my expert friend, she said, "Well, obviously that pizza means something to him . . . "
So if you want to use drawing as a form of narration, you might try being not obviously directive about it. After a reading, you might just have "drawing time." Maybe what your child draws will be obviously something about what she has just heard or read. Maybe it won't be obviously a clear narration -- but it might give her time to process and respond with something that's not a castle, because you've left your expectation more open. She may be drawing these repeated castles because that's an easy answer to give -- "Mom wants me to narrate the fairy tale. Fairy tales have castles. I know how to draw a castle. Here you go, Mom. A castle." But if the drawing time is more open-ended, and not being done as an overt part of the reading package, that may lead to something more revelatory.
I think, anyway! Or maybe that castle really does mean something to her, just like the pizza. The other part of this is that we have to be willing to trust our kids' responses as valid, whether they're what we expect or not. That can be hard, especially if we (by which I mean "I," because I struggle with this) see other people's kids' beautiful narration artwork (or nature-study art, or whatever) on their blogs, and what our kid draws day after day is a castle, or a pizza, or -- in the case of one of my sons -- the same two stick figures fighting with lightsabers. I have some super-non-cooperators when it comes to narration, even after all this time, so I just try not to sweat this too much . . .
Re independent reading: how old is your daughter? I just gradually started adding in a handful of things to be read independently each day -- short, and not much, at first, doing everything else as a read-aloud; and over time, as I saw a given child could handle it, with understanding, transitioning to lighter and lighter read-alouds, and heavier and heavier independent readings.
Sorry, that probably sounds vague! But I think the key is to give what she can handle *and* comprehend on her own, in small amounts first, then gradually building up. I hope that's helpful!
Sally
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4Real Forums : Language Arts Come Alive
Topic: Other forms of narration
