by Karen Glass
I did write extensively about the whole process of learning to write through written narrations in Know and Tell, but that big picture has to be broken down into individual school years, and semesters or terms, and—of course—individual weeks. What will we do about written narrations this year? What do I need to do this week?
I’m going to try to break this down into steps that you can use to evaluate your student, set realistic goals, and create a plan that will allow your child to make progress this school year—just this school year—without worrying too much about the Whole Thing. I’m assuming you understand the purpose of oral and written narration, and that you desire to make narration the foundation for a significant portion of your child’s writing instruction (there’s room for some outside resources, but that’s not what this is about). Let’s figure this out.
Okay, the first thing you need to think about is what your child is doing right now. What was the norm when you left off at the end of last school year? If you’re just getting started, the obvious place to begin is at the beginning, with one written narration per week. But maybe you’ve already been doing written narrations, and last year your child was doing two per week, or three. That’s where you start now. For the first four to six weeks of this school year, just let your child get back into the rhythm of doing what he already knows how to do. Don’t ask for anything else just yet.
As you think about this—where your child is with written narrations—there are two things to think about—how frequently the written narrations are done, and how long they are. As children make the transition from oral to written narrations, the earliest written narrations may be much, much shorter than oral narrations. Don’t worry about that. Some children can just barely write a sentence or two when they begin, while others are ready to write multiple paragraphs. No matter what your child is doing when you begin written narrations, accept what they can do.
What I never said plainly in Know and Tell, but wish I had, is that it is better to increase the frequency of written narrations first, and then work on asking for longer narrations. A child who can write three sentences will find it easier to write three sentences twice a week, and eventually every day, than to be pressed to write five sentence. Once he is writing three sentences every day (and that’s just an arbitrary example), the extra practice will be the best preparation for writing five sentences, or half a page, or five minutes longer, or whatever method you find most effective when asking for longer narrations.
Once you have determined where your child is with written narration skills, the second step is to think about where you’d like to be at the end of the school year. This is a goal that cannot be set by any arbitrary rule. You must think about your child’s age, inclination to write, and the amount of educational years still in front of you. If you are just starting written narration with a 9-year-old, begin with one per week, and maybe your goal will be three written narrations per week by the end of the school year. If you divide your school year into three terms as AmblesideOnline does, you can plan to spend the first term doing one per week, and add the second narration per week at the beginning of term two, and the third one at the beginning of term three.
Or perhaps your child is just starting written narration at age 11. You can start with one per week, but you would like your child to be writing daily by the end of the year. Add a second narration per week within three or four weeks, and another one every eight weeks or so, so that you finish the year with a child who is doing daily written narrations.
Or maybe you finished up last year with a child who had gotten up to daily narrations, but they are still short, only 30-50 words. Your child is 12, and you’d like to finish up the year with a child writing 100-150 words per day. Maybe you’d also like to introduce editing and correcting before the year is over. Let your child have a few weeks of writing what he is comfortable with, and bump up your expectations about 25 words at a time, every eight weeks or so. As the narrations get a little longer, introduce editing during the second semester with just one narration per week. (Just a note—my preference is to ask for a certain number of words and my children have responded well to that. You may prefer to increase length more generally—“half a page, a whole page”—, or by number of sentences, or by the amount of time spent writing. Choose the method that causes the least stress for your child.)
No one can decide what your goal should be, but you definitely want to have one for the school year, because that helps you to break down the process of getting from where you are to where you want to be into manageable increments.
The third step is to revisit your goal once or twice during the year. Maybe your child has already reached the level you were aiming for by Christmas break. That’s great, but you’ll probably want to thoughtfully move forward during the second half of the year. On the other hand, maybe your 9-year-old is still having a meltdown every time it’s written narration day. Perhaps changing the goal from “three narrations a week” to “two narrations a week” or even “one narration a week without a meltdown” is more realistic. Maybe your 11-year-old is already doing daily narrations and is ready to work on lengthening them a bit. Maybe your child needs a bit of a challenge with creative narrations or would benefit from reading a book on the craft of writing. Another thing I haven’t discussed, but which can be a part of your narration goals for the year, is mechanical correctness. Some children readily begin sentences with capital letters, and others don’t. Keep the “rules” as few as possible, but as your children grow more adept at actually getting words on paper, it’s okay to say, “Please make sure you’ve ended every sentence with a period,” or whatever rule you’re hoping to make habitual.
And that’s it! Plan your work, then work your plan, as they say. Just three things to do, and I think if you do them at the beginning of each term or semester, you’ll find that they keep you on track. Assess what your child is doing now. Set a goal and figure out the steps that will get you there. Reevaluate midway through the process to see if the goal needs to be adjusted. You're on your way! You and your child have an individualized plan that you can fold into your homeschool week, and when the school year is over, you’ll be able to see definitely what progress was made. And then next year, you can do it again, from your new starting point.
There are some charts in Know and Tell that will give you an overview of the process that you can expect to unfold across the grade levels, but they are guidelines and suggestions only. Every child is different when it comes to writing, but if you set realistic goals and work purposefully toward them, this may be your best narration year yet.
Showing posts with label written narration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label written narration. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 19, 2020
Setting Yearly Goals for Written Narration
Wednesday, March 22, 2017
Language Arts on the Fly
by Leslie Laurio
Language arts are probably the easiest part of educating with Charlotte Mason's methods. It's so deceptively simple that I've graduated three students who are proficient in language skills without ever purchasing a Language Arts program or cracking open a spelling book. In fact, one of my graduates went on to major in English at college and was the subject of a doctoral thesis on CM's language arts acquisition.
What's the secret? It's this: you learn to read by reading, and you learn to write by writing. Or, to amplify it a bit, you learn to read and comprehend and know what words look like by reading, and you learn to write and spell and punctuate by using those things as you write, and sometimes by noticing your own mistakes and mentally correcting them.
But what does that look like?
It might look like you're not doing much in the way of language arts. :-) But there's more learning going on with CM's methods than meets the eye. The details will probably look a little different from one home to the next, but here's how we did it.
In the early preschool years, I read picture books to my kids. We did lots and lots of reading.
When they "started school" at age six or seven, they started daily copywork. I would write a word or two on a sheet of elementary-lined paper, and the child would copy it underneath. In some cases, the child would trace it first and then try to write it. Tracing was always more fun with a colored pencil or highlighter! Choosing a word to write was pretty straightforward: "You liked the Peter Rabbit story we read today where he sees the white cat twitching its tail; would you like to write 'Peter' today?" My son might say, "Can I write 'white cat' instead?" So I would write "white cat" lightly in pencil on a sheet of lined paper and he would trace it, and then copy it. Sometimes the child had definite ideas of his own about what to write. One child wanted to write "Happy Birthday" every day for the two weeks before his birthday. Another child wrote her own name a lot. One child went through a cowboy phase and wanted to write "horse" every day, so I let him. Usually there would be little doodles of horses or something, and those are articles of "schoolwork" that I still cherish (along with one son's written narrations which were always bordered with stick figures dueling with lightsabers . . )
Later, when copying a single word became too easy, we moved on to short sentences, which I would write on lined paper for the child to copy underneath. It was always easy to come up with something, either from something going on in real life, or from something we had been reading: "Balto is a good dog," or "I am seven years old." "Polly is my pet horse." I usually just came up with something relevant off the top of my head, or sometimes the child already knew what he wanted to write: "I want to write, '"Molly is our new cat!'"
When we moved up to slightly longer sentences, I started taking things from real print. This was never difficult, since we're homeschooling with real books and always surrounded with text. I would pick up a book, usually one we were using for school that day, open to what we had just read, and scan the text for a suitable sentence -- something in the general vicinity of the length I wanted without any complicated spellings (no foreign names, or regional dialect) or complicated punctuation. If the book would lay flat, the child could copy straight from the book. If not, I would still write it out by hand for him to copy. But since copywork at this point was still straightforward sentences, it was quick and easy for me to write it out -- it took all of maybe 90 seconds.
Sometimes I put more thought and organization into it. One year I collected Bible verses from the Children's Bible we were using and we used those, starting from the shortest verse and working our way to the longest. I picked out specific verses I wanted my children to internalize, about God's love and mercy, and verses about kindness, that sort of thing -- never verses chosen to chastise the child for some besetting sin. (Years later, I came across that list of verses, and they are currently posted on on the AO forum.)
Later, some of my children chose their own copywork. One transcribed entire chapters from The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Two of my sons transcribed George Washington's Rules of Civility -- we used a modernized copy because I wanted them copying correct spelling, not quaint antiquated English (but my daughter, who is currently doing that, insisted on using the original). I remind the child to try to copy word by word, not letter by letter, since seeing the word as a whole is what teaches spelling. I have a collection of quotable quotes about books and reading that I collected from the internet and saved in a document, and if any of my sons didn't have anything specific to write, they could use one of those.
As each child got older, his (or her) copywork increased in length, but never took longer than ten minutes unless the child just liked writing.
Around the time copywork started getting to a point where I thought the child could write a sentence or two on his own, we started written narrations. My first child did one written narration a week (because he loved to write, took a lot of time and care on his one narration, and was doing a lot of writing on his own outside of school). With the others, I think we started with a couple a week, then once a day, and settled at two half page narrations a day around seventh grade. Whatever wasn't written was narrated orally. In high school (around 10th grade), I started assigning written essays -- I collected SAT-type essay questions from the internet, printed them and cut them out, and the child would draw one from the collection, and that would be his writing assignment that day.
Around the time written narrations started, we also added studied dictation. My general method: open a book, pick a sentence. Hand child the book to study, when he's ready, I read the sentence out loud and he writes it. Boom, we're done.
We started dictations slow and easy: "Learn this sentence so you can write it without looking." It might be only four words long. After that seemed too easy, I made it tricky: "Learn this short paragraph with three sentences; you'll need to be able to write one of them without looking." My youngest is in the middle of this process now, and as I scan our school reading for an appropriate dictation passage, I'm starting to look for passages with quotation marks and semi-colons. Today's dictation was taken from Northanger Abbey, the chapter we read this morning. I never choose something she can't do, and she almost never makes a mistake. If she was making mistakes, I would back off and choose sentences with fewer complicated spellings, less punctuation, shorter length -- the point is for her to succeed, not to catch her in a mistake. The whole process takes maybe 10 minutes, and she much prefers this to copywork (we don't do copywork on the days we do dictation, it's either one or the other). She's always happy when it's a Dictation day and not a Copywork day.
Does that sound too easy? It actually is that easy -- in fact, it seems so self-evident that I feel redundant even writing it out. I find language arts to be the quickest, simplest, most painless part of a CM education. There's nothing to buy, no complicated curriculum to follow, no lists of vocabulary or spelling words to memorize, no contrived creative writing assignments -- the whole thing takes 5 or 10 minutes a day, and writing has never become a dreaded, tedious chore. In fact, most of my children's writing happens outside of school. With the skills they practice painlessly during school, they take off in their own time and write their own stories or plays or songs. I believe in making as little work and fuss as possible, and language arts is an area where simpler is truly better.
What's the secret? It's this: you learn to read by reading, and you learn to write by writing. Or, to amplify it a bit, you learn to read and comprehend and know what words look like by reading, and you learn to write and spell and punctuate by using those things as you write, and sometimes by noticing your own mistakes and mentally correcting them.
But what does that look like?
It might look like you're not doing much in the way of language arts. :-) But there's more learning going on with CM's methods than meets the eye. The details will probably look a little different from one home to the next, but here's how we did it.
In the early preschool years, I read picture books to my kids. We did lots and lots of reading.
When they "started school" at age six or seven, they started daily copywork. I would write a word or two on a sheet of elementary-lined paper, and the child would copy it underneath. In some cases, the child would trace it first and then try to write it. Tracing was always more fun with a colored pencil or highlighter! Choosing a word to write was pretty straightforward: "You liked the Peter Rabbit story we read today where he sees the white cat twitching its tail; would you like to write 'Peter' today?" My son might say, "Can I write 'white cat' instead?" So I would write "white cat" lightly in pencil on a sheet of lined paper and he would trace it, and then copy it. Sometimes the child had definite ideas of his own about what to write. One child wanted to write "Happy Birthday" every day for the two weeks before his birthday. Another child wrote her own name a lot. One child went through a cowboy phase and wanted to write "horse" every day, so I let him. Usually there would be little doodles of horses or something, and those are articles of "schoolwork" that I still cherish (along with one son's written narrations which were always bordered with stick figures dueling with lightsabers . . )
Later, when copying a single word became too easy, we moved on to short sentences, which I would write on lined paper for the child to copy underneath. It was always easy to come up with something, either from something going on in real life, or from something we had been reading: "Balto is a good dog," or "I am seven years old." "Polly is my pet horse." I usually just came up with something relevant off the top of my head, or sometimes the child already knew what he wanted to write: "I want to write, '"Molly is our new cat!'"
When we moved up to slightly longer sentences, I started taking things from real print. This was never difficult, since we're homeschooling with real books and always surrounded with text. I would pick up a book, usually one we were using for school that day, open to what we had just read, and scan the text for a suitable sentence -- something in the general vicinity of the length I wanted without any complicated spellings (no foreign names, or regional dialect) or complicated punctuation. If the book would lay flat, the child could copy straight from the book. If not, I would still write it out by hand for him to copy. But since copywork at this point was still straightforward sentences, it was quick and easy for me to write it out -- it took all of maybe 90 seconds.
Sometimes I put more thought and organization into it. One year I collected Bible verses from the Children's Bible we were using and we used those, starting from the shortest verse and working our way to the longest. I picked out specific verses I wanted my children to internalize, about God's love and mercy, and verses about kindness, that sort of thing -- never verses chosen to chastise the child for some besetting sin. (Years later, I came across that list of verses, and they are currently posted on on the AO forum.)
Later, some of my children chose their own copywork. One transcribed entire chapters from The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Two of my sons transcribed George Washington's Rules of Civility -- we used a modernized copy because I wanted them copying correct spelling, not quaint antiquated English (but my daughter, who is currently doing that, insisted on using the original). I remind the child to try to copy word by word, not letter by letter, since seeing the word as a whole is what teaches spelling. I have a collection of quotable quotes about books and reading that I collected from the internet and saved in a document, and if any of my sons didn't have anything specific to write, they could use one of those.
As each child got older, his (or her) copywork increased in length, but never took longer than ten minutes unless the child just liked writing.
Around the time copywork started getting to a point where I thought the child could write a sentence or two on his own, we started written narrations. My first child did one written narration a week (because he loved to write, took a lot of time and care on his one narration, and was doing a lot of writing on his own outside of school). With the others, I think we started with a couple a week, then once a day, and settled at two half page narrations a day around seventh grade. Whatever wasn't written was narrated orally. In high school (around 10th grade), I started assigning written essays -- I collected SAT-type essay questions from the internet, printed them and cut them out, and the child would draw one from the collection, and that would be his writing assignment that day.
Around the time written narrations started, we also added studied dictation. My general method: open a book, pick a sentence. Hand child the book to study, when he's ready, I read the sentence out loud and he writes it. Boom, we're done.
We started dictations slow and easy: "Learn this sentence so you can write it without looking." It might be only four words long. After that seemed too easy, I made it tricky: "Learn this short paragraph with three sentences; you'll need to be able to write one of them without looking." My youngest is in the middle of this process now, and as I scan our school reading for an appropriate dictation passage, I'm starting to look for passages with quotation marks and semi-colons. Today's dictation was taken from Northanger Abbey, the chapter we read this morning. I never choose something she can't do, and she almost never makes a mistake. If she was making mistakes, I would back off and choose sentences with fewer complicated spellings, less punctuation, shorter length -- the point is for her to succeed, not to catch her in a mistake. The whole process takes maybe 10 minutes, and she much prefers this to copywork (we don't do copywork on the days we do dictation, it's either one or the other). She's always happy when it's a Dictation day and not a Copywork day.
Does that sound too easy? It actually is that easy -- in fact, it seems so self-evident that I feel redundant even writing it out. I find language arts to be the quickest, simplest, most painless part of a CM education. There's nothing to buy, no complicated curriculum to follow, no lists of vocabulary or spelling words to memorize, no contrived creative writing assignments -- the whole thing takes 5 or 10 minutes a day, and writing has never become a dreaded, tedious chore. In fact, most of my children's writing happens outside of school. With the skills they practice painlessly during school, they take off in their own time and write their own stories or plays or songs. I believe in making as little work and fuss as possible, and language arts is an area where simpler is truly better.
Friday, July 3, 2015
Beginning Charlotte Mason's Methods with Older Students
by Karen Glass
Your children didn't start narration at age six? They haven't been keeping a Book of Centuries since they were ten? They've never made a single entry in a nature notebook? It must be too late to start a Charlotte Mason education now...right?
Wrong.
It is not too late, not even a little bit too late, and in spite of the fact that I did begin using CM's methods earlier with my own children, I feel quite confident in saying that it's not too late to begin now, even if your child is starting high school, because Charlotte Mason didn't think it was too late.
Children are born persons, right? Well, they are still persons when they start high school, and all of the things Charlotte Mason said were true of little children--that they have a living mind which is hungry for knowledge--are still true if your child is fourteen. If they've been educated with meager or non-existent portions of living ideas, they might even be starving. I don't think we'd tell a hungry famine victim that just because they aren't used to good food, it's too late to eat a healthy diet now. It would be just as silly to make our older children subsist mentally on starvation rations when a feast of living ideas is available.
If you are in this situation, and want to begin using Charlotte Mason's methods with your older children, I recommend spending a little time reading what Charlotte Mason herself thought was possible for 14 to 18-year-olds who could only attend school for eight hours per week ("Continuation Schools" allowed that much time for education for wage-earning young people when the Fisher Act was passed in England in 1915.) Without any consideration for what type of schooling they might have had previously, she is confident that they can begin narration (which is a very natural human activity), read and understand meaty books, and get through a generous amount of liberal education in the time allotted for them. It would be encouraging to read though the chapter "The Scope of Continuation Schools "(originally published as a stand-alone pamphlet) from A Philosophy of Education.
Charlotte Mason thought they could accomplish much in that amount of time. She didn't worry about Latin--or even math (assuming they already had basic math, probably, and would continue to hone those skills)--but she was concerned to offer them all the riches of an education in the humanities. She gave them credit for having a natural hunger for knowledge, and she concludes with confidence:
The first question most parents coming to AmblesideOnline will ask is "what year should I start with?" The answer to that question is going to be a little different for each individual. Any of the years from 7 and above are appropriate for high school students, and where you begin will probably reflect, in part, what history your children have already covered. You'll also want to consider how many years of homeschooling you have left. Specific questions about where to start in your situation can be asked and will always be answered on the AmblesideOnline forum.
One of the most overwhelming new things is the process of oral-to-written narration that makes up the bulk of "composition" or "writing." This may feel daunting, and your children may not be used to narration, but an older student can adapt quickly, and within the course of one semester, reach a similar degree of fluency in narration which younger children might take five or six years to achieve. Consistency is the key. Your children already know how to narrate--they have probably narrated the plot of their favorite books, movies, and television programs to you or to their friends, or described in detail a dramatic occasion during a camping trip or sport event. They know how to narrate, but what they have to learn to do is give enough attention to their school work to be able to bring that power to bear. I've broken down the process into what I believe is a very manageable approach for students who still have about four years of homeschool left.
First semester: Begin oral narration immediately, and after a few weeks of oral narration, begin asking for written narrations. I'd start with 2 per week, and add another every week or two until they are doing written narration 4-5 days every week. There is no need to ask for any special form, and no need for correction at this stage, although it would be fair to insist on proper capitalization and punctuation for this age. Just ask for written narrations, so that your child can grow fluent in getting his thoughts down on paper (or let him type if that works better).
Second semester: Keep it up, unflaggingly. Remember, consistency. Until you see it happen, you have no idea how powerful and formative a year of daily oral and written narration, based upon excellent books, will be in the life of a young person.
Third semester: After a full year of informal written narration, begin the next year where you left off (4-5 written narrations per week). If your child is a bit bored of just "telling back," that's perfect. They are ready for more. Begin asking for more focused or creative narrations once per week (or even every other week at first). The list of possibilities is endless, so choose the ones that will capture the interest and imagination of your child: a dialogue between a fictional character and a historical one on a topic at hand...a character sketch...a letter to the editor about a historical situation (war, election, slavery, etc...) as if it were a current event...a first-person diary account as if written by the main character in a book, etc, etc. Give them some scope to stretch their creative wings, and don't worry them about corrections just yet. You'll be teaching grammar and (hopefully) doing dictation at other times, and those activities are sharpening the skills that will make their writing better as you continue.
Fourth semester: This is a good time to introduce a book about writing or style. Strunk and White's Elements of Style and William Zinsser's On Writing Well are my choices, and are both recommended in the AO curriculum. You might ask for a longer writing project this semester that will require a couple of weeks' work. It's also a good time to introduce the idea of refining a "rough draft." (All of their written narrations are rough drafts.) Choose one paper or narration per week, read it aloud sentence by sentence, and talk about ways to improve each one. If there are grammar/punctuation issues, you can begin the process of learning how to find/fix those errors. Ideally, your child should be able to write 300-500 word narrations very easily at this point in the process. (If they aren't typing yet, get them started.)
The last two years: With two years of copious, and mostly informal writing under their belts, most children will be ready to begin formal instruction. Difficult as it is for us to realize today, Charlotte Mason didn't recommend formal writing instruction until the last few years of school, even for those who had been been following her methods from the beginning. Narration is a natural process of building composition skills. Trust that process. Now you can pick a writing program and begin shaping your narrations into standard forms. You'll still have two good years left to work on it--and it is enough. I have done it exactly as I have described here. Children who are fluent in writing narrations don't need more than two years to learn how to produce standard types of writing such as comparison/contrast or cause/effect papers.
In twenty years of online community with fellow Charlotte-Mason homeschoolers, I have seen the same story played out over and over again. Charlotte Mason has so much to offer us as parent/teachers, that our lives have been enriched and changed for the better. Of course it's not too late for our high schoolers. We just need to have the same confidence in them that Charlotte Mason had--confidence enough to follow her principles and lay out the feast for them.
Your children didn't start narration at age six? They haven't been keeping a Book of Centuries since they were ten? They've never made a single entry in a nature notebook? It must be too late to start a Charlotte Mason education now...right?
Wrong.
It is not too late, not even a little bit too late, and in spite of the fact that I did begin using CM's methods earlier with my own children, I feel quite confident in saying that it's not too late to begin now, even if your child is starting high school, because Charlotte Mason didn't think it was too late.
Children are born persons, right? Well, they are still persons when they start high school, and all of the things Charlotte Mason said were true of little children--that they have a living mind which is hungry for knowledge--are still true if your child is fourteen. If they've been educated with meager or non-existent portions of living ideas, they might even be starving. I don't think we'd tell a hungry famine victim that just because they aren't used to good food, it's too late to eat a healthy diet now. It would be just as silly to make our older children subsist mentally on starvation rations when a feast of living ideas is available.
If you are in this situation, and want to begin using Charlotte Mason's methods with your older children, I recommend spending a little time reading what Charlotte Mason herself thought was possible for 14 to 18-year-olds who could only attend school for eight hours per week ("Continuation Schools" allowed that much time for education for wage-earning young people when the Fisher Act was passed in England in 1915.) Without any consideration for what type of schooling they might have had previously, she is confident that they can begin narration (which is a very natural human activity), read and understand meaty books, and get through a generous amount of liberal education in the time allotted for them. It would be encouraging to read though the chapter "The Scope of Continuation Schools "(originally published as a stand-alone pamphlet) from A Philosophy of Education.
Charlotte Mason thought they could accomplish much in that amount of time. She didn't worry about Latin--or even math (assuming they already had basic math, probably, and would continue to hone those skills)--but she was concerned to offer them all the riches of an education in the humanities. She gave them credit for having a natural hunger for knowledge, and she concludes with confidence:
The desire for that fruit is probably what motivates a homeschooling parent to change gears and pursue a Charlotte Mason education with their older children, and we have much more than eight hours per week in which to accomplish it, which should allow time for the necessary modern extras and requirements as well.We can give to the people the thought of the best minds and we can secure on their part the conscious intellectual effort, the act of knowing, which bears fruit in capability, character, and conduct. (Vol. 6, p. 298)
The first question most parents coming to AmblesideOnline will ask is "what year should I start with?" The answer to that question is going to be a little different for each individual. Any of the years from 7 and above are appropriate for high school students, and where you begin will probably reflect, in part, what history your children have already covered. You'll also want to consider how many years of homeschooling you have left. Specific questions about where to start in your situation can be asked and will always be answered on the AmblesideOnline forum.
One of the most overwhelming new things is the process of oral-to-written narration that makes up the bulk of "composition" or "writing." This may feel daunting, and your children may not be used to narration, but an older student can adapt quickly, and within the course of one semester, reach a similar degree of fluency in narration which younger children might take five or six years to achieve. Consistency is the key. Your children already know how to narrate--they have probably narrated the plot of their favorite books, movies, and television programs to you or to their friends, or described in detail a dramatic occasion during a camping trip or sport event. They know how to narrate, but what they have to learn to do is give enough attention to their school work to be able to bring that power to bear. I've broken down the process into what I believe is a very manageable approach for students who still have about four years of homeschool left.
First semester: Begin oral narration immediately, and after a few weeks of oral narration, begin asking for written narrations. I'd start with 2 per week, and add another every week or two until they are doing written narration 4-5 days every week. There is no need to ask for any special form, and no need for correction at this stage, although it would be fair to insist on proper capitalization and punctuation for this age. Just ask for written narrations, so that your child can grow fluent in getting his thoughts down on paper (or let him type if that works better).
Second semester: Keep it up, unflaggingly. Remember, consistency. Until you see it happen, you have no idea how powerful and formative a year of daily oral and written narration, based upon excellent books, will be in the life of a young person.
Third semester: After a full year of informal written narration, begin the next year where you left off (4-5 written narrations per week). If your child is a bit bored of just "telling back," that's perfect. They are ready for more. Begin asking for more focused or creative narrations once per week (or even every other week at first). The list of possibilities is endless, so choose the ones that will capture the interest and imagination of your child: a dialogue between a fictional character and a historical one on a topic at hand...a character sketch...a letter to the editor about a historical situation (war, election, slavery, etc...) as if it were a current event...a first-person diary account as if written by the main character in a book, etc, etc. Give them some scope to stretch their creative wings, and don't worry them about corrections just yet. You'll be teaching grammar and (hopefully) doing dictation at other times, and those activities are sharpening the skills that will make their writing better as you continue.
Fourth semester: This is a good time to introduce a book about writing or style. Strunk and White's Elements of Style and William Zinsser's On Writing Well are my choices, and are both recommended in the AO curriculum. You might ask for a longer writing project this semester that will require a couple of weeks' work. It's also a good time to introduce the idea of refining a "rough draft." (All of their written narrations are rough drafts.) Choose one paper or narration per week, read it aloud sentence by sentence, and talk about ways to improve each one. If there are grammar/punctuation issues, you can begin the process of learning how to find/fix those errors. Ideally, your child should be able to write 300-500 word narrations very easily at this point in the process. (If they aren't typing yet, get them started.)
The last two years: With two years of copious, and mostly informal writing under their belts, most children will be ready to begin formal instruction. Difficult as it is for us to realize today, Charlotte Mason didn't recommend formal writing instruction until the last few years of school, even for those who had been been following her methods from the beginning. Narration is a natural process of building composition skills. Trust that process. Now you can pick a writing program and begin shaping your narrations into standard forms. You'll still have two good years left to work on it--and it is enough. I have done it exactly as I have described here. Children who are fluent in writing narrations don't need more than two years to learn how to produce standard types of writing such as comparison/contrast or cause/effect papers.
In twenty years of online community with fellow Charlotte-Mason homeschoolers, I have seen the same story played out over and over again. Charlotte Mason has so much to offer us as parent/teachers, that our lives have been enriched and changed for the better. Of course it's not too late for our high schoolers. We just need to have the same confidence in them that Charlotte Mason had--confidence enough to follow her principles and lay out the feast for them.
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