What I Learned about Narration

In February, my learning focus was on narration. I have a vague set of steps for my learning focuses (foci??) . I commit myself to:

• Doing a bit of research (that's the easy part for me)
• Thinking about it (still pretty easy).
• Putting it into practice (hard for me) -- which brings me to the dancing part of the process, because I have to make this into a sort of lateral move:
• Resolve to take the first baby step (I wrote about it here) and then DO it. This makes it much more likely that I'll actually put the information and pondering to some practical use.
  
• Reflecting on the whole thing (that's what this post is about)
  

Narration has always been a challenge for me. It sounds great. I like the concept much better than that of filling in the blanks or just writing down factual details upon request of a worksheet or textbook.

However, I find it a giant strain to narrate. Even thought I am the adult recommending it to my children. In certain ways it almost interferes with my thinking process. It brings it up to the surface ahead of time. So I have always hesitated to impose what seems like a bit of a mental disruption on my kids.

One of the challenges I gave myself last month was to practice narrating, myself. That is, when I sit down and read David Copperfield or MacBeth or Charlotte Mason's books, I have to close the book regularly and mentally or in written form, do a narration.

I found that though it seems superficial to my thinking process, it did help me to pin down details and do what CM claimed narration would help people do: create a web of associations in their mind, so the knowledge was easier to retrieve later.

It's also incredibly difficult for me to actually make myself do this! I would far rather just race on through the book to find out what happens.

The other small step I made was to ask for narrations from my middle school age boys. Oral, so far -- I haven't asked for written, yet. I would occasionally get narrations from my kids in the past so we weren't starting from scratch (and of course, almost all kids will spontaneously retell things that interest them, and mine are no exception).

This was difficult, especially when they complained. I could understand their complaints of embarrassment, particularly, and the mental difficulty of dredging words out of impressions.

But they have made some excellent narrations, which encourages me.

Finally, the third baby step was to pay attention to the "pre-narrations" of the little ones, and consciously build on these. I am not sure why this had really not occurred to me before. Every little child will make comments on his picture books or point to the pictures or say "read the one about....." . Or acted them out, with their action figures or in person. These are preliminary narrations. If I keep aware of this and gently extend the interaction, they will not remember a time when we haven't "retold" or "talked about" or "made up stories about" their books.

I still have to keep aware of the mental disruption part. One thing that I have found helpful is to give them a bit of time to ponder. It slows down the pace. It lets me collect my persona and move it to the background so the narration is as much as possible THEIR mental activity and not being pushed or helped by me.

Sometimes I do help them start a narration. That's because introverts often legitimately need some kind of hook to bring their thinking process up to the surface of their minds. It is a bit like journal prompts only those are so often overdone and to me, anxiety-inspiring. I try to keep it very low-key.

I have been gravitating naturally to a more topical or dialectical mode with my 14 year old. I can't find the quote right now, but Charlotte Mason recommends that narration in older children be transmuted into something more like the high school level essay where a child synthesizes or analyzes content from various sources. I rediscovered this by trial and error when asking him for narrations. My 11 year old, on the other hand, is still quite content with very detailed and articulate narrative accounts.