Using our new composition notebooks has been educational, not just for the kids, but for me, too. I've been a bit frustrated at our exams because the kids don't remember details from their reading, but I haven't known what to do about it, unless I start giving them lists of names, dates and places to memorize. J and L haven't been writing much for school at all. L is ten and just getting to the point where he'd be doing written narrations, so I had started having him do one a week at the beginning of this term six weeks ago. I hadn't been requiring any more than one a week from J because he's still learning to spell and I didn't want to ask too much of him.
So I made them each a composition notebook, a handy size they could fill in a term, and asked them to write a brief summary of everything they read for school. They still narrate orally - longer oral narrations, but concise snippets for their books. That was my thought. So far it's been going well. The biggest surprise is J (Year 7). He doesn't want to write concise summary snippets. He says he'll remember better if he writes more, and he says he loves to write. Who knew? He requested that he do written narrations instead of oral, so we'll try that and see how it goes.
This morning I wrote down some names on a sheet of paper before we read 1 Sam 26 - Saul, Abner, David and Abishai. I told them I wanted them to use those names in their written narrations, and I left the paper out for them to spell the names correctly. Charlotte Mason did that - writing certain things on the chalkboard that she wanted her students to look for in their reading. I don't know if she left them up for her students to copy the spelling. She probably had them memorize the spelling by closing their eyes and visualizing the word, and then erased the board. But we're taking this one step at a time.
L was having a tough time with his Plutarch narration, so I let him dictate it to me - he knew what he wanted to say, but he was having trouble getting it on to the page. I wrote it out on a scrap sheet of paper as he dictated, and he copied that into his booklet in his own handwriting. I noticed that he revised and consolidated as he copied, which is probably a beneficial exercise in itself. I think we're going to do his Plutarch narrations this way from now on.
I don't know what kind of a difference all this is going to make educationally - I won't find out until exam time. But I think it will help.
Here's a peek at their notebooks to show how they're set up and how we're utilizing the space on the pages. This is pretty much how the notebooks I saw from some PNEU students were done - with more than one entry on each page, and each entry dated.
L's book, age ten, Ambleside Online Year 4
J's book, age 13, Ambleside Online Year 7
T's book, age 16, Ambleside Online Year 11; his book is not only a bit bigger, but it has more pages - 48. He'll fill his because he writes more - written narrations are nothing new to him.
Miss M, age 3, Ambleside Online Year 0, has her own book - I gave her the one that I accidentally put the pages in upside down so the top margin is at the bottom. She likes to do whatever her brothers are doing!
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