Everything You Need to Know About Homeschool Narration || How We Use Narration in Our Large Family

hi everyone it's Sherry from our life homeschooling where I share homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms today I want to talk to you about a homeschool narration and how we use it in our large family if you're new to my channel my name is Sher I'm a homeschooling mom to 10 kids I'm married to my high school sweetheart Nelson we've been married for 23 years I'm a former public school teacher turned homeschool Mom I love coming on here every week and encouraging you The Homeschool mom in the great work that you're doing at home at the beginning of the year I mentioned that one of my goals this year was to focus more on narration in our home homeschool so that's been something I've been reading a lot more about thinking more about I've been reading the book know and tell by Karen glass it's excellent and I want to come on here and just help moms I've had a couple moms ask me what is narration can you just explain it from the very Basics so that's what I'm going to attempt to do today I've also written a blog post on this that just really lays everything out in detail if that if you find that an easier way to learn or if you want to just go back and reference different things I also have in there some samples of narrations that my kids have given if that is something that would be helpful for you narration is a Hidden Gem if you're not using narration along with copy workor which I think is another Super tool I've done other videos on copy workor in fact I'll make sure to link at least one of them for you in the notes below but if you're not using narration in your home school you are missing out on one of the most effective tools for helping your kids become good communicators good writers what is narration it's simply telling in fact it's something that's so simple that I think a lot of parents either overthink it or Overlook it because it just seems too simple it's almost like they they can't understand it or grasp it because it's just can't be that good if you're just kids are just telling they tell all the time how can this be anything special or how can this develop good writers in children in fact there's a good chance that you're already using it in your home school when you ask your kids to tell about their day or if you're sitting around the dinner table and you're asking them different questions about different things that they've done this is them telling it's something that's natural and narr is starting with that natural um inclination that kids have to tell stories and turning it into writing so they begin with oral narrations and then eventually when they become fluent at that they progress to putting it to pen and writing narrations now as I mentioned before narration is such an effective tool for developing good writers so why is it so effective when I was in college I studied education later went on to do my student teaching I taught in the public schools for a couple years when I was in class in one of my education class we learned about Bloom's taxonomy if you're a former teacher that would be something that would be very familiar to you it was a hierarchy of questioning so you wanted to get your kids you wanted to ask questions that were higher up on this level of Bloom's taxonomy that was going to evoke deeper thinking for them more creative thinking analytical thinking so at the very bottom of this this triangle of Bloom's taxonomy the very bottom is just answering measurable objective questions um what did you see when you were at the playground and it would just have an obvious answer this would be like multiple choice questions what was there was you know what was at the playground a bird a ball or a swim these are very basic questions that require very little thinking and what we were taught as upand cominging teachers was to try to ask questions that would evoke higher levels of thinking so higher up on this triangle of questioning and when you got to the top level you were asking questions that were deeper that would make kids really reason a little bit more and as I was reading the book no and tell the art of narration by Karen glass she gave a statement that just really resonated with me when I was reflecting back on how we learned this in college and it just showed to me why narration is so Superior and it starts with the higher level thinking she says a teacher May suppose that leading children through a series of questions will teach children to think and reason for themselves however the one who asks the question is the one who has thought about the material the most when you have your kids narrate you are having them start at the highest level of thinking in fact they are sorting putting things into order deciding what's important what's not important and giving you a retelling of the story so that they actually are the most fit to create a test or Create a quiz the person who has thought about the material the most who has thought about the questions is the one that's most most ready to make a test the one who's asked the questions is the one that is the most familiar with the material and that is what narration does for kids it starts them at that highest level of thinking and they become the most familiar with the material because they are asking the questions so narration really replaces multiple choice fill-in the blank type quizzes and tests that kids that we all grew up with it's so much better than this because it actually requires them to know the material well they're not just having to go back and and think about one particular thing that just happens to be on this test that maybe wasn't really important to their version of what they saw or what they read narration is superior to quizzing and to test it replaces them because it's a better method if you have a hard time believing this I think the best way to convince you is to try it yourself I've done this myself I read a short paragraph of a book several years ago and I handed it over to my husband and I tried to narrate to him and um it was a lot harder than I thought it would be you're really sifting through thoughts and ideas and deciding what comes first well then what came next and then what's at the end and then what's important and what should I leave out it requires a lot of brain thought and then what happens after you give a narration is the material is cemented in your brain you just know it a lot better than if you had read it walked away or even if you had read it and been quizzed on it you have digested the material the content and presented it to someone else how do you teach narration I'm going to give it to you in three bit basic steps the first step is that you have to start with quality literature your kids cannot express what they don't possess if you're asking them to give a narration and you're only reading to them just silly little cartoon style books twaddle they're just going to give you they're going to regurgitate something that sounds like what they ate for breakfast it's not going to be interesting it's not going to be engaging you have to be reading quality living books to your kids the second step is oral narrations and like I mentioned before this is probably something that you are already doing from the time our kids start talking we're asking them to tell back to us about their day about the time at Grandma's about what it was like at the park they're already doing this I start being more intentional with this around the age of six so when my kids are six I start slowly and um I'll do a short reading and instead of asking them to tell back to me at the end of the reading I start with just short paragraphs or a page so I'll read a part of the story and then I'll stop and say all right now tell back to me what I read so far because if you read a whole book a whole long section for young children it's really hard for them to remember all those details by the time you come to the end so with a new child that's narrating more more focused for the first time I start in small sections if you want to see the fruit of narration you really need to be consistent and make it something that you do daily I try to make sure I do it with my young kids at least every day have them given an oral narration um if you want to do more you can I wouldn't overdo it but just make sure you're being consistent and doing it daily it's a long game if you do it regularly over a period of time you're going to see great fruit but don't expect your kids to get better at it if you're inconsistent now one thing I think that's really important to know when you're starting out with a young child is not to be discouraged by their first narrations the first narrations that a child gives and this is other than those ones that come naturally when they're young and you're just asking them about their day when you're being more intentional about it the first narrations they give are not going to be good they're going to be confused because what you're training them to do you're training their power of attention so the first time you read and you have them tell back to you they're not paying as close attention as they will be after the 10th time when they realize that they have to give this information back up to this point they may be listening to a lot of of stories and taking in this important fact or that important detail but they're not paying close enough attention to the point that they're going to have to tell all of it back to you in detail so their first narrations are probably not going to be good and it's really important not to be discouraged by that but to just know that if you keep being consistent and keep doing it every day you're going to see progress in fact I've noticed with with my kids it usually takes um I don't know five maybe five or six times with a new narrator before they finally realize that they really need to pay attention that that's really what it comes down to so they start really listening to the details the third step to teaching homeschool narration is written narration now if you've been doing oral narration with your kids every day consistently over a period of time they are just naturally going to be ready to write it they're doing this it requires no more work than what they've already been doing they're doing the same thing they're telling the story back but now they're just putting pen to paper and writing out what they've been saying already now all kids are going to be ready for this at different times um because kids are individuals and they develop at different Paces amble side online I I I think Charlotte Mason recommended around fourth grades that would be around age 9 or 10 but it's going to be different for each of your kids so when you have a child the mo one of the most important things is that they can write hand write fluently so if handwriting is a struggle for them still they're probably not ready to do written narrations once handwriting is just something so fluent for them and it's easy then they can start doing written narrations one of the ways that I transition from oral narrations to written is by having my kids give me the oral narration that we've been doing um all this time and I type it out so I type it out word for word every mistake every um every like I put it in there and then I have them look at it and I have them read it out loud to me and when they read it out loud and they see their narration in writing it helps them to see some of the ways they can improve this is the first step that I do and then next when I feel like they're ready I let them go ahead and start and um first I I would say about a half a page or whatever feels comfortable for them and um you can start by having them type it if that's easier I start by having my kids just write it out with pen and paper but once they are familiar with it are doing it a lot a lot of them do like to type their narrations and again as it becomes something that's easier and easier for them to do it's great to have them read it back to you A lot of times when my kids are reading their narrations back to me they're realizing that they can't even read their own handwriting or that they really didn't pay attention or didn't give then they they start making their own Corrections in their mind like oh wait that didn't happen next so they're able sometimes to see how they can improve and see some of their mistakes on their own when I have our kids start with written narration we start with just one week and we continue to do oral narrations I think this is really important because um it it continues that brain process of them really thinking through what happened and how to tell it back in the best way so continue with oral narrations but when you start have them do just one written narration a week and uh Karen glass in her book suggests working up to four narrations per week with my kids I do two we work up to two now I've gone through certain Seasons where we've really focused on narration and we've done more in a week but in general two is what works for us find the balance that works for you you'll know what seems like too much now I think it's it's important to let them write out the whole narration without any interruption or guidance from you to really think all the way through it themselves but afterwards I think it is okay as well to give them a little bit of instruction as far as especially as far as mechanics capitalization punctuation spelling little things like that just to you know point it out or help them to notice it but it should be their own it should be their own work and it's going to come naturally to them you think that not much is happening when they do these narrations week after week but if you look back in their notebook you're going to be able to see look at the beginning of the year and look at the end of the year narration fluency happens naturally I want to just briefly tell you how we use narration in our large family with several kids first I'm always working on oral narration with all my kids that are younger so the ones that aren't ready to write it out yet we do this I try to make sure I do at least one with them a day I don't write it out I don't really have a plan but in my mind I'm trying to make sure I ask at least one of them every day to narrate something back to me with my kids that are doing their own written work I start by giving them just a spiral notebook I write their name at the top I write narration under it that is their narration notebook for the year and I put on their checklist the certain days that I want them to do it this is something we go through at the beginning of the year together we create our checklist together me and the child individually and um then I expect them to do it and I randomly check it so they know that I'm going to be looking at them so this is how we do narr a just normally in our family but there are periods of time where I focus on it more intensely a couple years ago I wanted to really focus on narration I felt like the kids needed to improve in it so I was reading a short section from George Washington's world every day that's a book by jenev V Foster it's one of my favorites and um I would read it and I would have them do a written narration we did this at morning time and so they were doing I want to say probably at least four a week and we did that for a couple months to just really focus on it and I think this can be beneficial as as well we really focused on it it seemed like an intense time and then when we finished I decided that was great we had made a lot of progress but we just moved back again to the two written narrations per week and that works well for us I think what's really important is if you need to spend time focusing on on it cuz you want to see some improvement or you want to just um make it something that's intentional for you that's great but find the balance for how many narrations to require for your kids per week I hope this has encouraged you I would love it if you have experience with narration with your kids I would love it if you would just drop some comments below and let everyone else know what works for you how you use it in your home any tips tips that you have if you have further questions that I haven't covered in this video I would love to hear them and I'll do my best to answer them for you if you like the content in this video I'm going to direct you to this video that I did several months ago just showing you our stepbystep process of how I teach writing in our home school thanks for watching today have a great week