Ambleside Online Year 7 - Creative Narrations using Alliteration

Many children write verse as readily as prose, and the conciseness and power of bringing their subject matter to a point which this form of composition requires affords valuable mental training. One thing must be borne in mind. Exercises in scansion are as necessary in English as in Latin verse. Rhythm and accent on the other hand take care of themselves in proportion as a child is accustomed to read poetry.

A Philosophy of Education Pg. 193

Bengy is working through The Grammar of Poetry and I asked him to use write a narration based on the Battle of Bosworth (covered in AO Year 7) using alliteration:

Lesson 23 is on Alliterative Imitation and the student is asked to read some excerpts from Beowulf and then write an alliterative poem with a similar sound and feel. Bengy chose to base his poem on Ivanhoe.

We're not rushing through The Grammar of Poetry but it's been interesting to note that this is my son who would choose to do a poetic narration any day over any other kind of narration but he struggles with the more formalised presentation in this book. I have the older spiral edition which doesn't have a great deal of practice in some sections where it would have been helpful but there is a new version with additional aids that I haven't seen. The book does go in to quite a bit of technical detail on the different types of 'feet' which is probably the hardest part and there are numerous exercises in scansion. I like how the tropes or pictures such as similes, metaphors etc are presented but more ideas for practice would have been helpful. The book is easy to use and so far I haven't seen a book that includes both the writing of poetry and the appreciation of poetry that I like better.
Bengy says of the book: 'Some parts of it are interesting but some I find extremely boring.'

Ambleside Online Year 3 - Shakespeare, Plutarch & Poetic Narration

A few months ago I shared some of Moozle's written narrations inspired by Plutarch. Since then she has continued to do a written narration once or twice a week and has branched out a little from the letter form she started with.
The  first one here is still in letter form but was inspired after our weekly reading and listening to Twelfth Night, which we finished about six weeks ago.

This one was a 'news report' she wrote after we'd read a lesson from Plutarch's life of Crassus. Some poetic license was taken in the 'Consul Spiro Maximus Nero' addition - Spiro and various derivatives of said name have been popping up in all of her Plutarch narrations, regardless of whether the characters are Roman or Greek.

This one was done this morning. She's been keen to do a poetic narration and she asked if she could do one after reading a chapter of Our Island Story. I thought she'd be so intent on making it rhyme that it wouldn't make much sense but I was surprised when she came up with this: 

  

I shouldn't have been surprised because she's been listening to poetry for years and absorbing rhythm, rhyme and the beauty of words and that should translate into her writing at some point but I wasn't expecting it at this stage. Just as I wasn't expecting her to get anything much from Plutarch, either.

The reading of poetry will:

 '...accustom him to the delicate rendering of shades of meaning, and especially to make him aware that words are beautiful in themselves, that they are a source of pleasure, and are worthy of our honour.'

Home Education by Charlotte Mason

Pilgrim's Progress Notebook

Pilgrim's Progress is a wonderful read aloud which suits a broad range of ages. I read it to 4 of my children aged 7 to 17 years of age over a number of months and my 15 year old decided he'd do a pictorial narration. These are some of the notebook pages he did. It got out of order in the way I scanned it but it gives an idea of what he did.

 

 

Encouraging Children to Write - Late Readers

I've been asked at various times what I've done to get my children writing and whether there's a need to use resources to help in the writing process if you are following Charlotte Mason's educational ideas. What I've written here is my own personal experience: what has worked with my own children; what I've learned in the course of teaching various ages, stages and abilities; what I understand of CM's principles and how I've applied them as I've taught my children.

Charlotte Mason recommended that in the high school years, 'some definite teaching in the art of composition is advisable, but not too much, lest the young scholars be saddled with a stilted style which may encumber them for life.'

I know the writing process is a concern for many home educators and for those who have had no formal training themselves often feel unequipped for the task. My eldest three children (girl, boy, girl) were comfortable with writing and my main object was to encourage them, provide them with ideas from living books, give them an outlet or audience and work on giving their writing some polish. I'll share some of the ways I did this in another post.

I wanted to concentrate on what I did with my fourth child, Hoggy, in this post. A late reader, he was high school age before he could read well and even then he had difficulty with anything not in story form. I started to panic especially because I was comparing him to his older siblings at the same stage. He was totally different. I tried using different writing programmes, without much success, and then I thought I better do something about his vocabulary and tried using workbooks and other materials to try to make some progress. It was rather miserable for a while.

What I should have done was let him gain confidence and fluency with oral narration and then progress to written narration. He had some visual problems, least of which was short-sightedness and probably tracking issues, plus he is dominantly left handed, but information on these issues wasn't as accessible as it is now so it was trial and error.
I had read Charlotte Mason's ideas but only through the writings of others who had interpreted her but when Hoggy was about 15 years old, I began to read her own words (I started with A Philosophy Of Education) and began to put it into practice. Oral narration was the catalyst for his writing. It was the best thing I could have done.
A few months before he turned 17 years of age I started him on Ambleside Online Year 8 with his 15 year old brother. He completed that year and then six months of work I'd put together using a combination of AO years 10 and 11 after which he started work full time.

I love this quote by A.W. Tozer:

 

'That writer does the most for us who brings to our attention thoughts that lay close to our minds waiting to be acknowledged as our own. Such a man acts as a midwife to assist at the birth of ideas that had been gestating long within our souls, but which without his help might not have been born at all.'

Putting the right books into our children's hands helps them develop their thoughts and ideas and bring them to birth. Oral narration allows a late reader or struggling writer to perceive and articulate ideas without the encumbrance of putting them down on paper until they are at a stage of readiness.

Thoughts disentangle themselves as they flow through lips and fingertips.

Oral narration isn't second rate. It allows thoughts to disentangle themselves and it's difficult work. If you don't believe me, try it.

CM talks about giving our children 'enough work of the kind that from its absorbing interest compels reflection and tends to secure a mind continually and wholesomely occupied.'

There's a tendency to minimise the difficulty of the work we give to a student who's struggling with reading and writing but sometimes we have to act counter intuitively and allow them a mental challenge.  

Once there is fluency in oral narration - and that will come fairly quickly with an older child if they are given compelling and living books to read - they can begin writing their narrations.

Boys often find it easier to use the computer for this and I noticed a marked improvement in the quality of their work if they didn't have to wrestle with handwriting at the same time.

Tozer had another interesting thought:

Perception of ideas rather than the storing of them should be the aim of education. The mind should be an eye to see with rather than a bin to store facts in. 

I realised in my panic that I was focussing on facts rather than ideas. I was cleaning out out under our stairs yesterday and found a notebook Hoggy used for writing stories in when he was 12 years old. He'd been reading everything by G.A. Henty he could find, after he'd weaned himself off the Redwall series (temporarily) and he was inspired to write his own story. Seven years on I have a different perspective and I can see that the books he was reading were beginning to help form his writing. I think I was looking at all the mechanics; his spelling!! etc and I was anxious because I was concentrating on what he couldn't do rather than seeing that he had been absorbing ideas all along.

It took me awhile to wake up to the fact that it was story that inspired him and that he could write decently well if he had a model to work from. As I gave him more of a challenge with books over a period of time his writing improved and he became more articulate generally. Part of the problem was lack of confidence and that came as even he could see a vast improvement.

This is part of his story I found under the stairs. He had a list of characters and a prologue: 

 

 



The story went on for another nine pages.

These are examples of his work after he'd spent time on oral narration:

I got him to read aloud his narrations to me and he'd pick up errors or substitute words if he'd used a certain  word too often. He enjoyed doing various forms of narrations and when we added The Grammar of Poetry during AO 8, he attempted some poetic narrations. I put some of his work on Pinterest. Studied dictation helped with punctuation and spelling, while still using The Spalding Method, which I highly recommend for anyone who finds reading difficult.

 

 

So in summary the keys were:

Challenging living books
Regular oral narration 
Studied dictation
A wide variety of written narrations
A good spelling programme

Update: I found this website a couple of days after posting the above: Is My Child Just a Late Bloomer? Lists some 'red flags' regarding reading difficulties.

Plutarch Narrations from a 9 Year Old

Moozle has been listening in on our Plutarch readings since she was about 7 years old and has often surprised me by jumping in and giving her version of the story. I've just started her on written narrations this week by asking her to write a sentence on something she's read or I've read aloud to her. She wrote a couple of sentences after I read Our Island Story but she really wanted to write a narration based on Plutarch's life of Nicias which we started a few weeks ago. One of her brothers chose to write his narration from the viewpoint of Cleon, the antagonist, and Moozle decided she'd do something similar:

Yesterday I had to go out for a while and when I returned she'd done the work I'd asked her to do under the supervision of one of my older children who was home holding the fort and then she produced three more narrations she decided to write while I was out. (Her enthusiasm was partly because I said she could write in a lecture notepad...)
Last night she showed them to her dad and he read them aloud with a dramatic flourish (keeping the niaces and afears etc. intact).

Today she was still on a roll and came up with this:

We take the child to the living sources of history - a child of seven is fully able to comprehend Plutarch, in Plutarch's own words (translated), without any diluting and with little explanation.

Charlotte Mason, Volume II