Just something else I found online this morning & wanted to share with you all. Visit our Homeschool News Blog and News Feed page: http://www.homeeducator.com/ftblog.htmNarration by Karen Andreola Children like to chatter. Have you noticed? When they are young we can’t wait for them to walk and talk. We take joy in their first steps and their first words. As soon as they begin school, however, they must sit down and be quiet for long stretches of time. But nineteenth century British educator, Charlotte Mason, did things differently. She thought it a pity that “this amazing gift with which normal children are born is allowed to lie fallow in their education.” Like tapping a sugar maple for its sap, she tapped this talking resource in children. It was a rich commodity. She considered their telling to be the art of narration. Download the Current Issue in a PDF file directly to your desktop. Putting the Reading in One’s Own Words When a child narrates, he expresses what he has learned by telling it back to you in his own words. It is that simple. Isn’t it a pity that the simplest things in life get overlooked? Knowledge is not truly assimilated until it can be adequately reproduced. Miss Mason required children to “tell back” what was read aloud or to write about some part of what they read. “What a child digs for becomes his own possession,” she said. This simple, old- fashioned way of learning has been replaced by the convenient use of workbooks and the textbook questionnaire. Good Books and Narration Go Hand in Hand Charlotte Mason discovered that children narrate more readily and enthusiastically from books of literary quality than, from the typical schoolbook. One of the first things that impressed me about Miss Mason was her principle of using all sorts of good books for learning. She eschewed the use of the typical schoolbook, with its dry facts, bite-size-pieces of information, excerpts of other books, often watered-down.
Hmm, makes sense. I personally despised my textbooks, and plan to use as few traditional type materials as possible.
