I love a success story, and I know you do too. So I’m sharing a Twitter conversation I had with 3Gmom about my first Narration Basics blog post.

Worked thru this post w/ G#2 & she totally gets it!!! Narration Basics: Expectations #homeschool http://t.co/fzvdFIB via @jimmiescollage

July 15, 2011 8:32 am via Tweet ButtonReplyRetweetFavorite

@g3mom

g3mom

@g3mom I'd love to know more! You showed the post to your child?

July 15, 2011 2:17 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@JimmiesCollage

& Notebooking Fairy

@JimmiesCollage absolutely we read it verbatim &she gets it. Her 2 bros- not so much (although plenty verbal, but more purposeful)

July 15, 2011 4:17 pm via twidroydReplyRetweetFavorite

@g3mom

g3mom

@g3mom How old is she?

July 15, 2011 8:10 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@JimmiesCollage

& Notebooking Fairy

@JimmiesCollage G#2 is 9 & entering 4th grade. I think we've found something she likes about school

July 15, 2011 8:19 pm via twidroydReplyRetweetFavorite

@g3mom

g3mom

Wow. What a smart mom. She taught her child about narration by having her child simply read my post! I have to admit that I wouldn’t have thought of that strategy. But it worked for this fourth grader.

Sometimes we underestimate what our children can understand. But we really should include them in the planning of their homeschool.

PS If you’re wondering how I got these Tweets in a blog post, check out Blackbird Pie (a WordPress plugin).

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More Posts Like This One:

1. Narration Basics: Dealing with Problems
2. Narration Basics: From Oral to Written
3. Narration Reminders

This is the third and final post in the Narration Basics series. Other posts are
1. Narration Basics: Expectations
2. Narration Basics: From Oral to Written

Narration is simple. That means it is not complex to implement. You don’t need to buy anything. You merely ask your child to tell back (or write) what she just read (or heard).

However, narration is not simple in the sense that it is easy for the child to do. It is a complex cognitive (thinking) task. So although you’re asking a simple question, “So what did we read today?” the thought processes your child has to use to narrate are quite challenging.

As you develop the narration habit in your Charlotte Mason homeschool and practice narration, you may encounter some of these common problems. I certainly have faced these at various points with Sprite.

Each link is an article at Wizzley, a new publishing platform. (Join me with this referral link!)

Narration Problems

1. Narration is Too Hard This article outlines the cognitive challenge that narrating poses and some tips for making it easier.
2. The Narration Has Factual Errors What should you do when a narration is just plain wrong?
3. The Narration is Full of Mistakes This article deals with written narrations that have loads of misspellings, punctuation errors, etc.
4. The Narration Contains Extra Information Is it a problem when a child likes to elaborate on a retelling by adding her own details?
5. The Narration Lacks the Main Idea If a narration is missing the main idea, you know there is a problem. This article outlines what the problems may be and how to address them.

As my daughter develops and faces more challenging reading material, some of these problems resurface. But the good news is that narration becomes second nature as it is practiced over the years.

Oral narrations lay the foundation for written narrations. Written narrations lay the foundation for expository writing. So it is worth the investment of time and energy to correct the narration problems you see during homeschool lessons.

I’d love to know what problems your children commonly have with narration and what works best to solve them.

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More Posts Like This One:

1. Narration Basics: From Oral to Written
2. Narration Basics: Expectations
3. Narration

This is the second post in the Narration Basics series. View the first post at Narration Basics: Expecations.

Sherry, a blog reader, emailed me to say, “I can’t seem to make heads or tails of notebooking. I don’t know how to begin with ‘prompting’ the writing part. Do you ask questions? Do you tell her what to write?”

Although Sherry didn’t use the word narration, this is essentially a question about written narrations. Let’s assume that your child has read a chapter from a book or that maybe you’ve read it out loud to him. This child is at least third grade, the time when you begin to introduce written narrations, and may be as old as an eighth grader. This child is also accustomed to oral narrations. But now you are trying to make the shift into written narrations.

The shift is a slow transition that requires some intermediate steps. Don’t rush the processs. You have many years to move to and then to hone written narrations.

The Prompts

Yes, you can ask prompting questions to get the narration flowing. (Actually you can use those same questions for oral narrations.)

I have designed a free printable with narration starters. And I have an article at The Heart of the Matter that gives you more options for narration prompts. Print some prompt lists and put those in your Mom Notebook. Or you may want to give your child his own list for his notebook or minioffice.

Before writing anything, choose a question or two and let your child narrate orally. Discuss as necessary to perfect the narration if certain facts are omitted. Then tell your child to write down what he just told you orally.

That sounds easy enough, but most children making this transition are going to need more help than the command to “write down what you said.”

Other Helps for Written Narration

To smooth the transition to written narrations, there are a few “crutches” you can implement. Don’t think that crutches are bad. We use crutches when we have an injury that is healing. No one would criticize you for using crutches when you’ve sprained your ankle. In the same way, if a child needs a “crutch” as he develops a skill, then feel no shame in offering it. No one stays on crutches forever. (They hurt your armpits!) Eventually your child will move past these helps into full compositions.

• During the oral narration stage, jot down a brief outline of what your child says. Or you can work together to create a brief outline or list of key ideas. Let your child compose the written narration with the help of those notes.
• Give your child word banks with vocabulary essential to the narration.
• You can offer your child a notebooking page with two or three divisions on it and ask her to answer one question per division. Use sticky notes to attach the question right where the answer goes so she can’t forget.
• Use a timeline for narration. The structure of chronological order can help some children know what to write next.
• Record your child’s oral narration and let him play it back as he dictates what he said.

I’d love to hear what types of “crutches” you’ve used to help your children make the shift from oral to written narrations in your Charlotte Mason homeschool.

Read More

Read part 3 in the Narration Series:  Dealing with Narration Problems

Go back to main narration page.

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2. Narration Basics: Expectations
3. Implementing Charlotte Mason Basics

Shannon asked in a comment, “I would love to read more about narration… including examples of what to expect at different stages of reading and writing.”

This is such a great question and so hard to answer! Each child is different and develops at his own unique pace. But I’ll try to address the question.

First of all, if you are using narration from an early age, the development to more complex narrations will be natural. On the other hand, if you are starting to use narration with an upper elementary or older student, you may be discouraged when narrating is difficult. (I’ll be sharing more on dealing with specific narration problems in another post, so stay tuned.)

Narrating is a skill that has to be developed. Those early years of oral narration are foundational. But if that foundation was not laid, it can certainly be laid later on. It will probably take more effort because the nature of the material being narrated is going to be more challenging that the lessons a child had in early grades.

Here are my guidelines. These may not be exactly what a Charlotte Mason purist would say. But this is what I personally expect for my child. Adapt it for your own particular needs.

Narrating for Early Grades K-2

Narration at this stage is oral. You read out loud and your child tells you back what he heard. You start with small chunks — a few paragraphs, then a page, and finally a chapter. If your child can identify the main idea of the lesson and tell back the most important details, he is narrating successfully at this age.

If narration is written, it can be “fun” such as drawings or lapbooks. Simple lapbooks (actually the minibooks inside the lapbook) that divide information visibly into chunks help children see the organization of ideas in their lessons. This may not seem critical to you, but it lays a foundation for outlining and writing in later years. Try to choose minibooks that fit the content — a book with four flaps for four types of something, a wheel with three windows for three steps in a process, etc. Mentally organizing information is what narration and composition are about.

Sample “Written” Narrations from K-2

Narrating for Intermediate Grades 3-5

Narration during this stage is still heavily oral but written narrations are introduced. Children can write sentence and then paragraph narrations of their lessons. As you shift from oral to written narrations, you may want to go back to even smaller chunks of information than you had built up to. For example, if your third grader can narrate a chapter orally, when he narrates in writing, give him only a page worth of information. The format of the narration is more difficult, so adapt the amount of material. This increases incrementally until a fifth grader is occasionally doing written narrations of multi-page reading selections. I would recommend a written narration once or twice a week for a fifth grader.

You are probably still doing a lot of reading out loud, and there is plenty of oral narration continuing. The oral narrations can begin to extend beyond a strict retelling and include original thoughts, conclusions, and evaluations of the lesson material.

You can still effectively use lapbooks for narration. You will probably want to begin some notebooking at this stage too.

Sample Fifth Grade Written Narrations

Narrating for Middle School Grades 6-8

During middle school years, encourage your child to move more and more to written narrations. Require written narrations more often and in greater length.

More than likely, your child will outgrow lapbooks and move into notebooking. The notebooking can still include creative elements such as drawings, graphic organizers, timelines, and interviews. But the narrations become more and more text based with written words becoming the primary way of communicating ideas.

Oral narrations are still used. These are great time savers compared to written narrations and enable you to quickly check for understanding.

Sample Sixth Grade Written Narrations

Narrating for High School Grades 9-12

Narrations are primarily written. I’m not at this stage yet, so I encourage you to visit Barb over at Harmony Fine Arts. She has some excellent posts on narrations for high schoolers. From what I’ve seen, high school narrations are going to become more in-depth, longer, and more polished, often becoming full-blown compositions.

The skill of narrating becomes the foundation for writing which is one of the primary goals of a high school education.

Notes

These transitions are gradual. On the first day of a new school year, you don’t suddenly demand something drastically different from what you ended the previous year with. Instead, you add a little more length to the reading assignment to be narrated, you require a little bit more from the narration, or you increase the number of written narrations in a week or in a day.

If you have a sixth grader who is still in the 3rd-5th grade category as I’ve outlined it, don’t panic. Just be deliberate about expecting a tad more each month until you are where you need to be. And only you can decide where “need to be” is. My outline may not fit your child. My friend Barb has a post with a similar topic as this one. Read her outline of narration expectations at A System of Narration.

Read More

Part 2 of the Narration Series: From Oral to Written

Back to main Narration Page

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3. Narration

Paintbrushes for Chinese Watercolors and Caligraphy

Karen sent me some great questions about CM homeschooling via email. I thought they made perfect material for a blog post. And since I’ve been going through some serious blogging blahs lately, I am appreciative of the nudge, Karen.

Gaining a Cohesive Picture

I have two kids (3rd and 5th) and I ordered . . .  [Winter Promise].  I borrowed my resources from the library and began reading.  However, I don’t really understand how the kids piece all this information into a cohesive picture. For example, in a traditional textbook, you read your assignment and get the dates, the places, the people, etc.  You close your book and pick it up again the next day with continuing information.  It just flows.

Right now we are learning about Indians in North America while studying explorers (through Time Travelers), and I am trying to get them to see that they do relate.

You’ve discovered a huge difference between a textbook and a living book approach.  You are absolutely right. The textbook has it all outlined for you (often literally). The key ideas are in headings; the vocabulary words are bold; there are specific comprehension questions at the end of each chapter. It’s linear; A leads to B which comes before C. There’s a beautiful order and sense of safety in a textbook.

Using a living books approach is totally different. And this is on purpose. Charlotte Mason wanted children to think for themselves rather than being spoon-fed by the teacher (or a textbook in this case). The child is supposed to identify key events and important vocabulary. The child is supposed to make connections between facts, events, and concepts. (I talked about this in another post Unit Studies and Charlotte Mason.)

So what should you do if the connecting and thinking are not happening? Well, if you are sure the books are not too difficult for your children, then you may need to ask probing or guiding questions to help them make the connections. But your goal is to train them how to see those connections and not continue to lay it out for them forever. Thinking is actually a very difficult skill. It can take years to train this kind of reasoning, so don’t give up after a few months. Since this style of learning is new to your family, I encourage you to persist with it.

Continue reading, offering the meaty material that is worthy of thinking about. Continue guiding their thinking and modeling your own thinking outloud. Also use visual aids, maps, timelines, notebooking, and lots of narration to keep the thinking clear.

And keep your expectations realistic. At third and fifth grades, they are not going to see all the connections. But you will need to evaluate if what they are understanding is adequate. You at least want a big-picture understanding.

Notebooking and Narrating

I decided to add notebooking pages – that I created myself – to try to enforce what we are reading.  When should I incorporate them?  Once a week?  To try to make this clearer, I made a page on a sailor’s life.  I thought they could write about the food, disease, skills, etc. of a sailor.  I made another about Indians, another about explorers and they could add info about each topic.  Is that a good way to do it?  We have done almost no narration or notebooking.  This is all brand new to us.

First of all, good for you for making your own notebooking pages! (Your children can make them too if they like that kind of thing. Keep that in your back pocket for a future dose of variety.)

From a CM perspective, the notebooking pages are used for written narration. So your demands on the third grader would be different from the fifth grader. I say that short written narrations once or twice a week for a third grader are enough. The fifth grader can write slightly longer written narrations three or more times a week.

[The most recent newsletter from Simply Charlotte Mason has a great outline about narration at each level. Read that, and browse their other articles. SCM is a gold mine.]

But remember that although you want your children to narrate most everything they read (or you read to them), those narrations don’t have to be written. Oral narrations are effective as well. So you read and then narrate soon afterwards.

That narration can be oral or written. With oral narrations you have the gamut of talking, puppet shows, live enactments, etc. With writing, you can go the notebooking or lapbooking route. There is room for variety in how the narrations are done. So if you feel the notebooking is too limiting, feel free to mix it up. But then again, if those pages are working for you, don’t feel a need to add other things for their own sake. The point is  narration.

Narration Questions

Also, the narration questions confuse me.  Are they for the read alouds or their personal reading?  The questions supplied in the IG really don’t fit the historical information I am reading.  Also, how do I know the answers they give are correct if the questions are for their personal reading?  For example, my ds was reading Squanto, Friend of the Pilgrims to go along with our study.  I have not read the book, so if I gave him a question, I really wouldn’t know the answer.

The general expectation is that everything is narrated. But you can modify that. I don’t always ask my daughter to thoroughly narrate all the novels she reads. I want some to be just fun without any “work” attached.

You won’t know if answers to questions are right unless you read their books. So you should read them if you’re going to be looking for “correct answers” to questions. However, since narration is retelling, you really don’t need any specific questions. (Textbooks have specific questions that you can hunt down answers for — think short answer test questions. Narration is far more complex — think essay test questions.) There are general questions that work with many reading passages: What did you read? What were the main ideas? Explain what happened.

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3. Narration Basics: Dealing with Problems

I’ve recently reignited my fascination with graphic organizers. I always loved them as a public school teacher, and now I’m using them with Sprite for homeschooling. She’s a highly visual learner who has just moved up to the fifth grade, so they work very well for her.

WHAT

Graphic organizers (GOs) are simply ways to arrange information so that relationships among ideas are represented visually. Words are used but along with lines, arrows, circles, or other images that indicate sequence, cause and effect, or other relationships.

Spider Map

WHO

• anyone who needs to SEE the ideas visually, especially visual spatial learners
• students trying to organize their thoughts for a writing project or a notebooking page
• best for middle and high school students

WHEN

• During prewriting — the thinking, organizing, and planning stage of writing
• After reading and during reading
• For narration
• As notebooking pages
• In portfolios

Graphic Organizer used for Math

WHY

They work!  Research shows that that use of graphic organizers (GOs) is effective for helping both middle school and secondary students to organize and remember academic concepts. For more research, visit Mentoring Minds.

HOW

To be effective, GOs should be coherent. Make sure that the information is displayed clearly without any irrelevant details. The parts should be clearly labeled with relationships or sequences indicated by numbers, arrows, lines, etc. in a way that is logical to the student.

Some students like to use color and sketches to show relationships on GOs.

I tend to print out a whole set of graphic organizers, using various colors of paper. Then I keep them in a file in our homeschool area. When a prewriting or notebooking task comes up, I offer the set to Sprite and let her choose which layout best fits her needs.

Venn Diagram

How to Get Started

Download this PDF assortment Utah Education Network of six basic GOs. Print them out and keep them handy this week for notebooking, narration, book reports, or prewriting activities.

Or if you want a few more to start with, try this file North Carolina State University with dozens of GOs.

Or start with this file which includes an example use for each GO.

Any of these free printable graphic organizers can add structure to a noteboooking assignment. Often, they are less intimidating than an empty sheet of paper. The framework is already there, and your child simply fills in the ideas. Later, as students become familiar with the use of graphic organizers, they won’t need the forms at all. They can draw them on blank paper or even create their own customized GOs.

WHERE

The Super Duper Link List of Free Printable Graphic Organizers

The divisions here are somewhat arbitrary. Generally GOs can be used for many, many purposes. But for the sake of organization, I divided these links by subject area.

General Graphic Organizers

Education Place Graphic Organizers

All the standbys (story map, timeline, five W’s, flow chart, etc.) and some new ones — tree chart, ladder, idea wheel, etc.

Freeology – Free Printable Graphic Organizers

Be sure to go through all eight pages! There are a lot! All in PDF format.

Worksheet Works Graphic Organizer Generator

Customize several aspects of 12 different GOs. This is super neat! This site is currently in Beta and is free. In the future, I suspect it will require a paid membership.

Graphic Organizers that Support Specific Thinking

A short list of graphic organizers in Claris Works  & in PDF.
This site is unique because it tells the thinking skills that each graphic organizer taps into.

Region 15 Graphic Organizers

Options for English or Spanish, PDF or DOC, and landscape or portrait orientation. Includes all the standard graphic organizers plus writing portfolio, timelines, similes, predictions, etc.

Education Oasis Graphic Organizers

General graphic organizers in PDF format.

Education World’s Teacher Tools & Templates

These files are unique in that most of them are .doc format — you can download and modify them.

Graphic Organizers.com from Masterminds Publishing

Divided by category such as cause and effect, comparisons, & hierarchies.

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel Graphic Organizers

Divided by function — for presentations, for vocabulary, for summarizing, for sequencing, for main idea and supporting details, for making connections, for self-questioning, for inferences/predicting, for cause and effect, for compare and contrast, character maps, and writing. Most are PDF format. They appear to be scans of hard documents, so quality is mediocre.

Science

Science Class Graphic Organizers

Attractive, free graphic organizers divided by science categories.

Houghton Mifflin Science: Graphic Organizers

A LONG list of graphic organizers in PDF format that accompany Houghton Mifflin Science textbooks for grades 1-6. This list is very well organized so that the printables are easy to locate and use even without the textbook.

Hint — use Ctrl F to bring up the find function in your browser. Then enter your key words.

Language Arts

Graphic Organizers –Tools for Reading, Writing, & Thinking

Secondary level, language arts graphic organizers in PDF format. The ones for expository writing are especially nice.

Graphic Organizers for Reading Comprehension at Scholastic.com

Mostly related to reading fiction, but some general ones too.

Lesson Plan Printables –Writing

Lesson plans and printable graphic organizers related to writing.

Super Teacher Printable Graphic Organizers

Help your students organize their writing with Venn diagrams, story maps, and more. Your students can use the writing webs, chronological order charts to improve the organization of their writing.

Teacher Files Graphic Organizers

a variety of graphic organizers to help your students communicate their comprehension of text.

Busy Teacher’s Cafe Graphic Organizers

Another varied assortment of graphic organizers.

Math

SOUTHWEST GEORGIA RESA Math Graphic Organizers

A collection of math related GO’s in both DOC and PDF formats. Topics include area, ratios, quadrilaterals, cross sections, constructions, and much more. The site is a bit messy, but worth browsing around. Scroll do the bottom of the page for links to printables or use the pages dedicated to grades 4-8 and 9-12.

Fact Families Graphic Organizers

Attractive PDFs to record addition families for all addends from 4 to 12.

black and white graphic organizer images © CAST, 2007

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Sprite with Solar Eclipse Lapbook

When we started using lapbooks in Kindergarten, I didn’t know if we’d continue using them throughout the years or if lapbooking would taper off. At one point I thought we’d transition solely to notebooking. But Sprite still enjoys making minibooks, so we haven’t given up lapbooks altogether. Sometimes we mix up lapbooking and notebooking, too.

Yesterday was a good example of another lapbooking transition. I asked Sprite how she would like to narrate her solar eclipse experience, and she chose making a lapbook.

To give her a bit of structure, I listed five questions she should address in some way:

1.  What is a solar eclipse?

2.  What are the stages in a solar eclipse?

3.  How should you watch an eclipse?

4.  What parts of China could see the eclipse?

5.  What did you experience today, July 22, 2009?

She used newspaper clippings, blank minibooks that I’d already prepared, and her own creativity to devise with this simple lapbook.

Cover of Solar Eclipse Lapbook

Inside of Solar Eclipse Lapbook

How to Watch an Eclipse

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Narration Corner Bookmark

Narration is a cornerstone of a Charlotte Mason homeschool. But looking at the results of the poll on my Narration Helps page, a lot of us simply forget to do it! I could use reminders as well, so I created some simple bookmarks to put in all the books we’re reading.

Some are standard rectangular styled bookmarks, and some are the corner pocket type (seen in photo).

To go directly to the file, click HERE.  The PDF is hosted at Homeschool Launch and is also linked on the Narration Helps page.

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How does lapbooking fit into a Charlotte Mason homeschool?

When Miss Mason was alive, there was no such thing as “lapbooking.” Surely she was aware of the clever art of origami paper folding. But I doubt that her students used “hamburger” and “hotdog” folds to record their dictation each day.

Forces Lapbook

So does that automatically mean that lapbooking is off limits to a CM educator? A purist may say yes, the CM homeschool has no room for such modern, frivolous pursuits as folding paper into clever shapes and drawing silly pictures. That’s a waste of time that could be spent memorizing French conjugations or exploring the anthills in the backyard.But for most of us, more eclectic CM “adapters,” lapbooking can fit in well with a CM philosophy.

Basically, lapbooking is a form of narration.

It’s a written and/or visual form of narrating back what was learned that day, that lesson, or that week. That’s exactly how we use lapbooking.

Didn’t Miss Mason encourage the use of journals and timelines (a book of centuries)? Aren’t lapbooks similar to those in many ways — paper documentation, often in visual form, of what was studied?

How does a minibook come about? I certainly have in mind what I think should be in the minibook, but my aim is to draw that out of my daughter. So I’ll ask a question like,

• “What did we learn from that motion experiment?”
• “What were the most important ideas from these three pages about Hopi Indians?”
• “So, what should we put in a minibook about Pizarro?”

What she answers in response is her verbal narration. We usually hone it together before she puts it into the minibook, through some combination of writing and drawing.

Isn’t the verbal narration enough? Certainly it is. And sometimes we stop there. We don’t put everything we learn into a minibook. But my daughter is highly creative. She loves the artistic element of working with paper and markers. I am catering to her strengths through lapbooking and providing a record of her learning that she enjoys looking at again and again. I’ve discovered that she somehow needs to draw or move to express herself. She often grabs pencils as makeshift puppets to act out her narration or draws stick figures and maps on scrap paper to clarify it. I do require her to use words to express herself, but visual expression is also a valid form of demonstrating understanding. And for her, it seems to be her preferred style.

Could lapbooking simply be twaddle? Sure it could. In my opinion, many of the lapbooking kits that are for sale are basically glorified worksheets that require little thinking. Cut and paste, color a bit, and voila, you’ve made a lapbook. But if the creation of the minibook requires thought on the part of the student, then it is not meaningless.

If it’s a reflection of what the child has learned through living books and/or through direct observation, lapbooking has real value.

And then again, I do think that doing a rather empty lapbook kit is still superior to watching television or playing video games.
Here is an example of how we use CM and lapbooking  hand in hand.

We had been making minibooks during our four week study of motion and forces (a component within Noeo Physics 1). When it came time to assemble it all into the actual lapbook foundation, I told Sprite that she needed to create a cover image to represent what we learned about forces and motion (through our living books and experiments). When she was done, I had her explain how her drawing exemplified all we had learned. What follows is her narration.

Motion & Forces Lapbook Cover

The girl is running. That’s motion. And she’s pulling the kite. That’s a force.

The wind is pushing the kite; that’s also a force.

Gravity is pulling the girl and the dog down. She’s staying on earth and not floating or drifting away.

The kite is being pulled by the wind. Gravity is pulling it down, but it’s a (She lapses into Chinese here, searching for a good word.) ?? ?literally: competition?between these two forces.

The girl is running. Her shoes have friction with the ground. That’s good because without friction, she would not be able to stop.

She’s working by pulling the kite. Running is also work. Every motion is work – even your heartbeat is work. She uses her forces over a distance, and that means she’s doing work.

The dog is still. He is at rest.

The long kite is heavier, so the girl is using more force to hold it. The small kite is lighter, so it takes less force to hold it.

Actually, she touched on the main points of our entire study including the three laws of motion, gravity, work, and friction.  I have to think that Charlotte Mason would be pleased.

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More Posts Like This One:

1. Is Lapbooking Controlling Your Curriculum?
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3. Implementing Charlotte Mason Basics