Narrations Update

We've been trying our hand at narrations for a bit now, and it's going OK. Which is to say, I think it's working, but I'm still trying to figure out exactly what I'm looking for and what it should look like. Until I figure that out, it's hard to say exactly how well it's going!


I loved this narration - particularly the part Monkey added about the Lord telling Jonah "Thank you very much." That kid cracks me up. When he tells me, I do my best to write it down exactly in his words. This style, where I write what he tells me seems to go better than the more open-ended type I tried at first.


Here's another one that I liked. We read "The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig," which is a very entertaining book (as long as you don't look too closely at the subtext). Monkey loves the tools the pig uses to destroy the wolves' houses, and so they made it into the narration.

So, it's going pretty well. But posts about narrations always catch my eye. Over at Smooth Stones Academy, Jennifer just reposted a comparison between Charlotte Mason's thoughts on doing narrations and the descriptions of narrations in The Well-Trained Mind. She says:

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Essentially, the main difference between a WTM (Classical) narration and a CM narration is that the former wants more of a summary and the latter wants a child to tell all he is able to recall.

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I'd have to agree with her conclusion that these are two separate skills, both worthy of attention. Monkey tends to start out pretty rambly, and I help him focus down a bit, so we can fit it on the paper, and he retells me, so it's in his words. Perhaps we should sometimes do both styles in separate narrations. We'll have plenty in the next while as we start adding a bit more to our schedule.