Narration and Gentle Learning Continued

We had our first official parents support meeting last night.  Needless to say the powers that be decided to grace us with a little authenticity:  our host had no power!  She was very gracious to still host and have a candle lit home (and a little help from a borrowed generator).  There were ten of us present and I feel very blessed that we could get together.  To start we shared a little about how we came to share this journey.  Half of us have been doing it from the beginning and the rest decided to pull our children from school systems for various reasons.  One thing is true: we all care about our children and their futures.

We began our discussion with "what did Gentle Learning mean to us?"  I encourage you to follow the discussion at Simply Charlotte Mason.  Sonya mentioned in her post today that Karen Andreola will be a guest next week.  We then turned our attention to our book for discussion.  A few topics were covered with interest: living/whole books vs. twaddle, various subjects offered in a term, poetry, and our biggest emphasis was on narration.

There were some great ideas from moms who have been homeschooling for many years on how to approach this with our children.  Among those thoughts were using shorter passages, picking just a few books to start, randomly picking times to narrate, group narrations with siblings, having dad incorporate narrations at the end of the day,  using other methods of narration like drawings or presentations.   I think we agree that narration is a habit that the child will build once they have routine,consistency and practice.

One mom asked how do you start the habit in children younger than six who are not expected to narrate yet.  I found this to be an excellent question because Charlotte Mason does refer, in her Volume 1, that keeping children outdoors for many hours develops the art of observation and attention.  The children naturally notice so much and are so eager to tell us about it.  This focus and observation is key to getting them started in the path of attention and narration.  Their focus is now shifted to telling you about his readings, rather, than just the things he observes outdoors.  We briefly touched on written narrations; I think we will have to cover this further.

I promised at the meeting that I would link to Nancy's post at ChildlLight and on her blog.  At the bottom of her post she links to a wonderful report by Dr. Carroll Smith on the importance and benefits to narration: the idea of reading and telling back what you have read.  I really encourage you to take a look at that too.

Great meeting ladies, thank you!