Narration During At Home Learning

 

Dear Ambleside Parents, 

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During these days of Ambleside At Home Learning, it is important to invite your children to tell back throughout their morning work to secure their attention and their understanding.

One of the distinctives of a Charlotte Mason education is the use of narration, the simple method of “telling back” whatever has been read, seen, or heard.  

Narration of their reading at home will quicken their power of attention and concentration and nourish their minds with knowledge.  

In the classroom at Ambleside, students narrate throughout the school day, using the author’s own language, sequence, and detail in their retelling in a manner that makes the material their own. Narration is not parroting, summarizing, analyzing, critiquing, or giving opinions, but simply giving students the opportunity to share what has been captured in their minds’ eye.  For narration to be trained as a habit in students, however, it should be required and not optional.  

Charlotte Mason, in School Education says,

“The simplest way of dealing with a paragraph or a chapter is to require the child to narrate its contents after a single attentive reading--one reading, however, slow, should be made a condition...It is not a bad test of education to be able to give the points of a description, the sequence of a series of incidents, the links in a chain of arguments, correctly, after a single careful reading.  This is a power which a barrister, a publisher, a scholar, labours to acquire; and it is a power which children can acquire with great ease.”  

During “At Home Learning,” we are asking older students to narrate silently after their reading. This is best accomplished, by reading a paragraph, a page or an episode, closing the eyes and telling it back in a whisper.  While they are reading on their own, you might pause them and have them tell what they have read so far. Students with whom you are reading aloud, will just need a starting place in the text and your eager interest.   

With multiple children reading different texts for the next few weeks, you may not have time to hear every narration, but here are some helpful suggestions for your home schoolroom

  • Take turns at the lunch and dinner table to tell back some of the reading of the day.  Listen to their retellings with interest and curiosity. 

  • Do not be anxious if your student cannot narrate. Ask them to simply “say something,” or invite them to illustrate the story they just read.  Whatever the case, don’t riddle your student with questions and corrections. Let them tell what they know freely. 

  • At Ambleside, we read most books out loud in class, so it might be helpful for you to read some of them at home.  For some students, providing a way for them to record their narrations or asking them to tell a sibling is helpful.  

  • Narration practice can be varied.  For example, students might draw an image of what they read and tell you the story, outline the main actions of an episode, list of the main points, or write a few questions about the text.  

Whatever the case, let these days at home bring moments of shared joy and delight for your family. 

For the Children’s Sake, 

Ginnie Wilcox

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