I've been careful since the onset of our schooling in January not to get too excited with homeschooling and burn out the kids or myself. I'm trying to stick to the motto of "short and sweet".
Grace will be turning 6 next month. And then our schooling will be "Charlotte Mason Legal". (I seem to recall somewhere in my Charlotte Mason reading that technically schooling shouldn't start until the age of 6 anyway.) What I have been the most hesitant about is doing narrations. I believe in them, but I knew it would be a sticking point in our house, as it seems to be for many children at first.
So this past term I started easing into it. Grace has been working on creating books from three selections of reading material (Pagoo, Tree in the Trail, and Ben Franklin). Often it is up to her to make up a summarizing sentence about what occured in the chapter, and then draw a picture with it. This was my idea of a narration primer. And it has worked for the most part.
I also started asking, "So what happened in our chapter today?". At first I got the standard "I don't remember." So I would start it by saying something like "There was a man named King Alfred who ran away from the Danes to an island and then..." This would seem to get the wheels turning.
But yesterday was it. It was beautiful. A true narration from Baldwin's 50 Famous Stories, with big words, and a remarkable word for word recall on a number of sentences. There was order, chronology, good sense and little prompting from me. Wahoo! I was so excited with her narration, that I think she really drew from my enthusiasm.
In true dork mom fashion, we did high fives at the end.
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