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KindlED
The KindlED Podcast explores the science of nurturing children's potential and creating empowering learning environments. Powered by Prenda, each episode offers actionable insights to help you ignite your child's love of learning. We'll dive into evidence-based tools and techniques that kindle curiosity, motivation, and well-being in young learners. Do you have a question, topic, or story you'd like to share with us? Get in touch at podcast@prenda.com.
KindlED
Episode 65: Know and Tell, The Power of Narration. A Conversation with Karen Glass.
Karen Glass discusses the power of narration in education, sharing her journey from homeschooling mom to Charlotte Mason education expert and author of "Know and Tell: The Art of Narration."
• Narration is simply telling back what you've learned, a natural human activity we use to build relationships
• Charlotte Mason's educational philosophy centers on two key principles: "children are born persons" and "education is a science of relations"
• Narration develops multiple cognitive skills including comprehension, memory, ordering of thoughts, and communication
• The progression of narration moves from oral telling (ages 6-9) to written narration (10-12) to formal composition (junior high and high school)
• Narration can be applied to any subject and take many forms—oral, written, artistic, dramatic, or even through building models
• Children don't always enjoy narration, but it works effectively regardless, developing communication skills that serve students throughout life
• Special needs children can benefit from narration through alternative expressions like drawing, building, or dramatic play
• The mental processes involved in narration help students build connections between subjects and with their prior knowledge
About our guest
Karen Glass has been studying and learning about Charlotte Mason’s philosophy of education since 1994. She homeschooled her four children who are now all adult graduates, but her passion for this life-giving view of education has not diminished and she welcomes opportunities to share it with others. She has spoken at homeschool conferences, taught online classes, conducted teacher training at schools, and served as an adjunct professor to teach college-level classes. She is the author of several books based upon Charlotte Mason’s ideas, including Consider This, Know and Tell: The Art of Narration, In Vital Harmony, and most recently Much May Be Done with Sparrows. After living in Krakow, Poland for almost 25 years, she now lives in rural Indiana where she continues to read, learn, teach, and write.
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About the podcast
The KindlED Podcast explores the science of nurturing children's potential and creating empowering learning environments.
Powered by Prenda Microschools, each episode offers actionable insights to help you ignite your child's love of learning. We'll dive into evidence-based tools and techniques that kindle young learners' curiosity, motivation, and well-being.
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That whole telling thing is how we form friendships, it's how we get to know people, it's how they get to know us. And so when you bring it into an academic setting and you say I'm going to have you tell about the things that you're learning about, you kind of tap into that natural relational process. That's just part of who we are as persons.
Speaker 2:Hi and welcome to the Kindled podcast where we dig into the art and science. And welcome to the Kindled podcast where we dig into the art and science behind kindling the motivation, curiosity and mental well-being of the young humans in our lives.
Speaker 3:Together, we'll discover practical tools and strategies you can use to help kids unlock their full potential and become the strongest version of their future selves. So we're going to talk to Karen Glass. She has been studying and learning about Charlotte Mason's philosophy of education since 1994. She homeschooled her four children, who are now all adult graduates. But her passion for this life-giving view of education has not diminished and she welcomes opportunities to share it with others. She has spoken at homeschool conferences, taught online classes, conducted teacher trainings at schools and served as an adjunct professor to teach college-level classes. She is also the author of several books based upon Charlotte Mason's ideas, including Consider this, know and Tell, the Art of Narration and Vital Harmony and, most recently, much May Be Done with Sparrows. After living in Krakow, poland, for almost 25 years, she now lives in rural Indiana, where she continues to read, learn, teach and write. Okay, let's go talk to Karen. Karen, we are so excited to have you on the Kindled podcast.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining us Well thank you so much for inviting me. I'm really excited to kind of meet your new audience. Yeah absolutely.
Speaker 3:We can't wait to introduce Charlotte Mason and narration to our audience. So can you start by sharing a little bit about your journey and education and what inspired you to write a book, and it's called Know and Tell, which I love. The name of that book, super fun, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, I started my educational journey when I realized I was going to need to homeschool my children.
Speaker 1:My husband and I were planning to move overseas for ministry and that's just kind of the default, like I was planning to homeschool my children and I was planning to just use a normal out of the box curriculum without giving it too much thought. But then I box curriculum without giving it too much thought. But then I, one of my kids were still quite, quite small, like three and nine months, I had the opportunity to go visit a homeschool curriculum fair and I thought, well, I'm going to homeschool, so you know, I'll just go see what they've got there, even though I, just in the back of my mind, I was already defaulting, you know, to this particular out of the box curriculum. While I was there, I wandered around and because I've always liked to read like I've always been a reader I was drawn to a particular vendor in the corner who had just a lot of books, like real books, interesting books that you'd want to read and not just textbooks and while I'm wandering around there with my babies, you know, with my babies.
Speaker 1:He came up and handed me a copy of the book For the Children's Sake by Susan Schaefer McCauley, which is kind of the gateway for most people my age to. Charlotte Mason handed me the copy of the book and says you need to read this book. So I bought it, I took it home, still have it and read it and I jokingly say well, that curriculum lost a customer forever Because it completely shifted my perspective on what education is and what it's meant to do. And so I went wholeheartedly into Charlotte Mason. As soon as I finished reading that book, I ordered her books Charlotte Mason's six fat volumes that she wrote about education and just jumped right in and started reading them. And I have the same experience that most people do when they first start reading Charlotte Mason's own words it's a little overwhelming. It's a lot overwhelming and at the time it was just kind of the dawn of the internet and I was able to go online via AOL. There was no web or internet like we know it today, but I went online and I found other people they're homeschoolers who wanted to read and study, and so we started reading and studying together.
Speaker 1:By the time my oldest actually was of an age to begin school. I'd had a couple of years of reading and thinking about it and I was just really committed to the concept of you know Charlotte Mason's view of education, which included narration. And I sometimes jokingly say the world and myself we're all very lucky that my oldest child was a natural narrator. Not all kids are, but he was a natural narrator and because of that, uh, as I jumped in and started using it, I saw how effective it was very quickly, which doesn't always happen with a six-year-old. It can take a little time for a child to grow into becoming a fluent narrator, but because my oldest was a natural narrator, he just showed me right away how effective it was.
Speaker 1:I I share a story in Know and Tell where November of that first year we read a book it was Alice Dalgleish's story of thanks, the Thanksgiving story and age appropriate and we read it and he narrated it which I know we haven't really talked yet about what that is, but we will and he read it and narrated it for about over the course of a week and a friend called me at the end of the week and she had a son a year older than mine a year, you know, a grade higher and she was a little disappointed because he'd had a writing assignment about the first Thanksgiving in his curriculum which is the same box curriculum that I had decided not to use and he was supposed to write two sentences about the first Thanksgiving and he had written the pilgrims are nice, the Indians are nice. And she was a little bit disappointed because it seemed a little bit lackluster. And so just after we were finished with the conversation I, out of curiosity, went back to my son, who was six years old, and I said what can you tell me about the first Thanksgiving? And he just told me the whole story because we'd read that book, he had narrated it, it was fresh in his mind and he was able to articulate all of the events, including names and specifics. And if I didn't transcribe it but if I had, it would have been like a page and a half long and it gave me a vision very, very early in the process of what a difference narration could make in a child's education. And I thought I want to see what's going to happen if we do this all the way through. So at the time it wasn't widely Charlotte Mason wasn't widely used beyond elementary age children and I didn't know anybody who had used Charlotte Mason's methods, but I was so impressed by what narration had done. You know what a difference it was making at that stage. I really wanted to see it and I committed us to it. I said we're going to do it all the way through and see what happens.
Speaker 1:He was about 10 and we had gotten into doing written narrations as well as oral ones. I remember thinking at the time so this would have been about 2000 or so I could write a whole book about this. Like by then, I had had other children, I'd seen other families using narration, I'd had the experience of we're using narration with children who weren't natural narrators and and how that worked with them, because he's the only one of my kids who's a natural, just a natural narrator. The others, you know, are kind of more typical, which means they struggle and it takes a little longer to to become fluent. And so by the time he was 10, I remember thinking, oh, I could write a whole book about narration, which eventually I did in 2018.
Speaker 1:I think I published Know and Tell. Took you 18 years of seeing how narration worked, like the vision that I had at the beginning. Well, I didn't know what it would look like, but I wanted to see, and so because of that, I paid a lot of attention across all of those years, not just to the way narration was working with my children, but the way that other families who were using it talked about it, and I was always watching. And so eventually, that experience of paying attention I was able to, you know, extrapolate basic ideas and principles that would make it work and try to make them as practical as I could. And so know and tell I've written several books is the only book that has any pretensions to be practical.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the how I found? I found it was on Instagram and I don't even think I followed the person. She was in her car and she had your book. And she was just like, even if you homeschool, you're an educator, even if you don't use Charlotte Mason, you need to read this book. I was like, okay, what is this book all about? And then, because we use Charlotte Mason and I don't have a natural narrator, I became really fascinated about okay, let's see how I can help him, because I see the value of narration and I see the value of these living books that he reads. And so, anyways, that's how I stumbled upon your work. And now here we are, getting to hear all about Charlotte Mason.
Speaker 2:So take us through Charlotte Mason a little bit Like what are the basic tenets, like how is it different than just like how we normally parent or educate what stands out to you?
Speaker 1:One of the things that I think really makes Charlotte Mason's approach to education distinctive is that she asked some really important questions about education which, if you look at the best educators throughout history and you look at what they were doing, they usually ask these same questions and they're really basic questions.
Speaker 1:So, for example, what is a child? What is this person that we're trying to educate? What is education? What is it? What are we trying to do Like, what is this process all about?
Speaker 1:So you, you know, a lot of times you, you, you, we tend to, as educators, jump into this process asking questions like you know, what curriculum do I need for math? What, how do I teach phonics? You know really specific, nitty gritty, practical things. But Charlotte Mason begins with these really big questions and then, once she answers them, what actually makes her kind of a genius, I would say as an educational philosopher, is that, once she answered those questions with what she considered to be principles, like undeniable principles about what a child and what education is I'll get to that in a second she was able to create really practical methods while keeping those principles in mind. So all of her methods are rooted in those principles and there's really now, if you pick up a book by Charlotte Mason, there's going to be about 20 principles listed at the front of them, but there's only two that are really central and all the rest are kind of anchored around them and they are the answer to those two questions. So the first principle is children are born persons. I mean, that's really really basic, really simple. And of course some of the other principles are to elaborate on what she means by that and what it means to be a person.
Speaker 1:And then she answers the other question what is education, by saying education is a science of relations. What she means by that is that a person has a natural relationship with all different areas of knowledge in the world, and she kind of divides all knowledge, and this corresponds to the sort of the medieval realms of knowledge where they had divine philosophy, moral philosophy, natural philosophy. She kind of breaks it up into the same general categories of knowledge of man, knowledge of God and knowledge of the world or the universe, the physical universe. And so she says as persons we all have a right to develop a relationship with all these different realms of knowledge, different realms of knowledge. And so she makes the educational process about helping a child not just learn and remember certain specific information, but to actually hopefully begin to care. That's what we think of in terms of a relationship, that it's more than just head knowledge, but it's a heart response, it's caring.
Speaker 1:She even says at one point the question isn't how much does the youth know when he's finished his education, how much does he care? That's what she's saying. It's all about the relationships. And then all of those practical things that we do in the Charlotte Mason educational paradigm, including narration, are relationship building activities, because that's, you know, she keeps those ideas central, even on a, you know, practical level. That's awesome, that's helpful. So hopefully that's good. I know we could do a whole episode on this.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I love that. The relationship. It just isn't the relationship between the adult and the child, but it's the child's relationship to the world and to what they're learning. I just think, right now we have beans growing on our windowsill and sometimes, you know, my son is on the spectrum and so some are autistic and sometimes, you know, he gets very, very hyper focused on something and it's really hard for him to form relationships with other things.
Speaker 3:And so he started school two weeks ago, in the very first day for science, instead of diving, we use Alviary. And so instead of diving right into his science book, which I think he's reading, the Girl who Drew Butterflies, and he's reading an Aristotle book, and so, instead of diving into that, it just said to plant some beans. And it's so amazing to watch his relationship with these plants, and so it's not just about, you know. And then now he has started reading the books that go along with why he needs to plant these beans. But it was really as you're talking. I'm like, yeah, he is developing this really beautiful relationship for things that grow. And then he went into my bin that has I mean, we have lots of seeds and he hasn't seemed interested in at all, and he's pulling them all out, and he's looking at the cooling hours and figuring out whenever we can start growing things. And this is just all just ignited by planting a few, you know beans, which is really cool.
Speaker 1:Right. So that is, you know, that's the underlying philosophy, and it's why narration is such a such such an important piece of what people think of as a Charlotte Mason education, because narration is a relationship building practice.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so can you dive into that? Like, what is narration? You know a lot of people may be unfamiliar that we've been saying the word a lot, so can you tell us what it is? And then, how does it differ from other forms of learning activities that you know? Because this could again, narration could be used in a traditional classroom as well and or in a homeschool environment. So like, how is that different? And then also, just what is it?
Speaker 1:Right, okay, so narration is basically a natural human activity. It's the same thing as telling, just telling. So I mean it's a natural part of our lives. So you know, if your child goes to a brick and mortar school and they come home and you say, well, what happened today? Or you start telling them about what happened at home while they were gone, you're narrating to each other. You know, if you read a book or listen to a great podcast or watch a great movie and you, you know, you go and start talking to a friend or your spouse about it because you want them to enter in and share your enthusiasm for it, that's narration, like it is the most basic kind of you know relating to somebody else, usually something, anything. It's not you know. You just, we just narrate about our lives and I said it's a relationship building activity and when you think of that in that context, you understand that when you talk to other people, that that's how relationships form. The more personal you tell them things, the more personal the relationship becomes. But even if you're at a doctor's office, relating the symptoms of your illness to your doctor, you're still narrating. It's just a professional relationship. But that whole telling thing is how we form friendships. It's how we get to know people, it's how they get to know us. And so when you bring it into an academic setting and you say I'm going to have you tell about the things that you're learning about, you kind of tap into that natural relational process. That's just part of who we are as persons. Again, it's related to that principle. You know of who we are as persons. Again, it's related to that principle. You know of who we are as persons and the way that we interact and relate with each other and with other things. So what it looks like if you're using narration in an academic setting is that a teacher or a parent will read something to a younger child, or a child is able to read for themselves, may go ahead and read something and then the child is invited to tell it back in their own words. So it's not like they need to memorize it word for word and retell it and building the habit of doing this. This is one of the reasons it could take a little longer.
Speaker 1:In Charlotte Mason's world she said this is six, with this formal request to say you know, here's some specific material that I want you to narrate, and the reason that she waited until then is because when you are called upon to narrate purposefully in that way some specific material, there's a huge amount of mental activity that has to go into it. But you have to understand what was heard, you have to remember what was. You know what was in the material. You have to order it, you have to find a beginning place and then work your way through it in some kind of an orderly fashion and then you have to formulate the words and sentences you know. That will allow you to convey what it is that you've said. It's much, much easier to tell you know what you had for breakfast or what happened at work today than to retell. You know a chapter in a book that you've read or some specific you know maybe you were reading about. You know a scientific principle about some kind of animal. It's more difficult to tell that material and it requires all of that mental activity. So it takes time for a child.
Speaker 1:Like I said, my son was a natural narrator. He just he could. And there are natural narrators out there who just like yep, that's no problem, let me tell you all about it, and sometimes their narrations will be longer than the original material. There are other kids who really struggle to do that. But it doesn't mean that narration is less effective if it doesn't come as naturally to a child as that for them, because it's building their mental skills.
Speaker 1:You know, all of those, all those habits of thinking. Narration actually trains you to think in a particular way, very, very different from the way that if you went to an institutional school where you were asked questions for specific pieces of information, that trains that. I mean, that's how I it was when I went to school, you know, and we were told, even told he'll read the questions at the end of the section. Before you read the section, then you know what you're looking for and you just skim for answers. It's a very different process and it teaches you to think in a completely different way than when you have to listen with enough attention to be able to retell it in your own words. So that's what narration looks like, you know.
Speaker 3:It sounds like it leads to a deeper learning and then also retention, would you say that? And then I'm thinking about we just interviewed Peter Lillidall. Yeah, so he wrote a book called Building Thinking Classrooms and his book is focusing on math. But he told us, you know, you can't learn unless you think. But he was going into classrooms like 400 classrooms and noticing that kids were not thinking, they were just mimicking or doing what the teacher was saying. So what I'm hearing is narrating really helps them retain the information because they're having to, like you said, there's so many cognitive processes happening. They have to really listen. So that's building up a really good habit. And then they have to, you know, spit it back out. So I could imagine, if you're doing this year after year, by the time you're 18, that you are a really good thinker and could use those skills for other things, especially if you know. You decide you know to go on to college or whatever that may be.
Speaker 3:And so Katie wrote a curriculum for our micro schools and it's called treasure hunt reading. And so they had these little stories like um, you know, they have a letter and then she has videos that go along with it. She's a venture K. It's really cool. And so my seven year old has been doing these and so I have been having him narrate these little stories back to me. And it is amazing, from the first day that I had him retell it to me, he gave me just a few details, just kind of like the pilgrims are nice, you know. And then now we've been doing it for a couple of weeks and he's even adding his own details to the story, because they're really short stories. But he's giving me details and then he's adding other adjectives and other words, and so it's really cool to see his mind developing just by using these. You know four or five sentence stories in this curriculum that he's using, so you can really use narration even if you're not using Charlotte Mason.
Speaker 1:All right. It's a method that can be applied in, you know, the classroom and homes, homeschools, in Sunday schools. I mean just almost any application where you've got people adults or children, you know in a learning situation. It can be used in all of those things. You know, in all of those things. And we've talked about narration, like because you know, when you first start kind of trying to understand what it is, we talk about it this way where the telling is just orally telling it back, but eventually that could become written narration and it builds communication and writing skills. You know, from age six to 18, as you said, this is helping children become better communicators. This is helping children become better communicators.
Speaker 1:I read an article in Forbes magazine quite a few years ago now and it was talking about the top. I don't remember the exact number, but like the top skills that employers look for, like these are the most things they value the most, and nine-tenths of them were accomplished through narration because they were all communication skills and so you know, no matter what our students you know are going to do later in life, my son, my natural communicator son, is now 34 years old and he's a sheriff's deputy. He's a Marine, is in the Marine Reserves and he has told me on multiple occasions situations where his narration, you know, habits and his practice, his ability to speak, has impressed people. And he has to write. You know he's a sheriff's deputy, so he has to write a report of every interaction he has with everybody, everywhere, every day. You know they have to make reports, and so there's his narration skills prepared him for that reports, and so there's his narration skills prepared him for that. When he was, when he was in training in the Marines, he had to read dispatches and you're supposed to summarize the orders and retell them, because they just come in a bullet point form but you have to explain them so that everybody in the you know, everybody in the group understands. And they just randomly picked a couple of people to demonstrate what it might look like. And so they randomly picked him and he did such an amazing job that they took him, because, I mean, he was just a recruit at the time. They took him to the officer's group where they were doing the same sort of thing and had him demonstrate it for them, because his narration skills were just prepared him to do this thing that they needed done.
Speaker 1:And that's the thing about narration. It's just it helps to build communication skills, both orally and in writing, comprehension skills, like you said, memory, if you think about in real life, um, if somebody gives you directions or they tell you they want you to pick up a couple of things at the store or something, the very first thing you do is you start repeating it back, like narrating it back to yourself, because that will help you remember. So, yes, you know, as you said, narration does play a role in memory and it also because you have to deal with all of your knowledge, kind of as a whole. It helps to make connections. You're always making connections and remember, education is a science of relations, in a Charlotte Mason paradigm, and this kind of activity helps you connect the things you're learning now with what you've already learned before. But it doesn't always have to be oral. That's what I actually was trying to say.
Speaker 1:You can narrate via drawing, drama, other art forms. There's more than one way to narrate. Subject matter is whatever the learning environment is. You can provide different ways for children to tell back what they know. One thing that we'll sometimes suggest is building models with you know, with blocks, with Legos, you know. Setting up a scene based on something that you read. And I sometimes say to moms Minecraft narrations aren't things. I've seen amazing kids build amazing things in Minecraft. Here's the ejection pyramids, here's the city of London, and that is a narration of a song.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I never thought of that. It reminds me of play therapy too. They, you know, give you a bunch of things and you have to retell, like what's going on or make sense of what's happening in your life by using blocks or little figurines or something. So it sounds very similar and connected to that.
Speaker 1:Right, and that's the thing. Sometimes you might not even realize how things actually fit under this umbrella of narration. Any form in which a person can tell or show what they know is a form of narration.
Speaker 2:I'm trying to imagine this happening in a classroom right now, like, typically, classrooms are not places where lots of kids talk. You know you're supposed to sit down and be quiet, right? So introducing narration as a teacher seems like a jump, but it doesn't have to be like a brick. Like this you could be like okay, now narrate to your neighbor, likeate, like switch. You know, like you, I'm thinking of different ways. What are some ways you can think of that we can get this into like other?
Speaker 1:areas right. Well, when Charlotte Mason yeah, when she introduced this idea and her her own curriculum was used in hundreds of schools in england during her lifetime, the typical teacher to student ratio was 1 to 40. It was typical to have 40 children in the classroom. So, yes, narration under those conditions, if you can imagine it. And they developed ways to make it work and, as you, one of them was to have the students narrate to each other, because narration is for the student, it's their own mental activity. That is like the really critical part of what's happening and that matters more than that. The teacher here, every single student, give a narration. So, allowing students to narrate. They would have students narrate just to a partner in groups, because they were a lot of. These schools were poorer schools and they couldn't even afford 40 copies of a book that was going to be used, so then only by 10. And then they would divide the group of 40 children up into groups of four and each group would get one book and they would read it to each other and then narrate to each other within their small groups.
Speaker 1:Another way that you can do it in the classroom silent narration is also legitimate. I will say that it's not something that you want to introduce until a child is completely comfortable and familiar and they know what is expected with narration. But once they do, you can ask them to narrate silently to themselves. So, for example, in a classroom, if there's been a lesson either where the teacher read something or some material or students read material for themselves, you can say okay, I want you to go ahead and narrate to yourself silently for two minutes and then you can begin a group narration where you have a child start at the beginning, narrate a part, and you just stop them and say call on the next person to pick it up and go through the narration where each child just narrates a part. And narrating a part is a legitimate mental exercise. It doesn't have to be every single thing I ever learn. I personally have to narrate the whole thing. It doesn't, you know. You can just be narrating parts of things.
Speaker 2:Two more kind of detailed questions do you ever correct a narration, like if they get a detail wrong or like leave some big part out, do you correct that? Do you prompt them with a question? How do you like support them in their narration as they're learning to do it better and better, right, well, one of charlotte mason's principles is not to interrupt a narration to let the child finish.
Speaker 1:So that's important, but it doesn't mean that you have to let wrong and you know if it's wrong. If they actually miss a critical point or said something that was incorrect, it doesn't mean you don't correct that, but you do let them finish. And then in a group situation, charlotte Mason would have let the rest, some other kids in the class, say you know anybody else have any other thoughts? Or did you hear something that needs to be, you know, straightened out, and let the other kids fix the narration and correct it. But if you're just working one-on-one with a particular student, you can say I think you misunderstood this. This is the way you know, this is how it actually is. You know correct something whatever it is, without you know making a big, you know production of it. But you do want to make sure that the child has the you know the right information. You don't have to do things we try to correct.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're not sitting there with a clipboard and a rubric like checking things off and giving points on a narration. It's like, okay, am I hearing the general gist of this and can I probe and prompt a little bit to round out that memory and that ability to communicate?
Speaker 1:Well, when you're first training a child with narration, a lot of times it isn't just that you want that something was wrong, but that it was just incomplete and you would like a little more.
Speaker 1:And so when they have finished and the reason and the reason that charlotte mason doesn't want you to interrupt is just it's about that respecting the child as a person and their interaction with the material all of that mental process will be interrupted if you stop them in the middle and they're not going to be able to go back.
Speaker 1:You know they have to get to the end of their thought process and then you can move on. And it's perfectly legitimate to say can you tell me a little bit more about something? And I think it helps if you're very specific. So you know, for example, you know if the child was narrating something about Benjamin Franklin and it just feels very general, and you say, well, can you tell me a little bit more about you know, the job he had in his family or what he did in his family's candle making business. Give them a specific starting point and then that is a little bit like a seed that they can. You might get more, you might not get more, depending on. You know how well they were paying attention, but at least that gives them something concrete to hang on to. So it's always, it's always okay to ask for a little more.
Speaker 2:And then my next question is how does this change? You've talked about starting at six, doing it naturally in the three, four, five range. And then how does it progress? You've mentioned writing. You know, talk, talk me through, like the developmental sequence of this.
Speaker 1:Right, okay, so I, I think of narration in terms of fluency, and so I, I, I think that there's a progression. There's kind of like four stages. So if you think about the first three years grades one to three or so, you're building oral fluency. And even even your, you know the ones who struggle a little bit more at age six, if they are allowed to narrate, you know, daily, by the time they're nine they will be quite fluent oral narrators and so right around, and so then the next three years say approximately ages, and so then the next three years say approximately ages 10 to 12, or grades 4 to 6, in that range you can introduce written narrations. And this is it's a process. You might start with just one written narration a week when they're nine, but your goal is fluency in written narration, but your goal is fluency in written narration. And so you're looking ahead to say at 12, maybe 13, that that child will be a fluent written narrator and they will be able to write as much in a written narration as they could give in a normal narration, just as fluently. It isn't quite the same thing, it's's not composition at that stage, it is just written narration. I often tell people the most important word in written narration is narration. The writing is just the means of narrating at that stage. But then by the time you hit that kind of junior high stage, the third stage is to go ahead and introduce formal composition. The third stage is to go ahead and introduce formal composition.
Speaker 1:Some students some kids might still be have not quite be fluent in their written narration. Some kids will be. You know, there's just a whole range of ability when it comes to writing. So some kids may still be working on their written fluency but even so they're usually ready to go ahead and begin what we think of as more formal composition. You know you can begin editing your work. We don't usually edit written narrations, we just consider them rough drafts and don't worry about correcting them. But you know, you hit that stage and it's partly because they begin to care themselves more about correctness in their writing. Some kids care at a younger age, but a lot of them don't. And so, but by the time they hit, you know 12 or you know, so they begin to care that their spelling is correct, that their you know their punctuation and capitalization, that their writing is more correct, and so you can begin working on, like editing those written narrations and introducing. You know more of the formalities of writing. You know introductions, conclusions, paragraph writing. You know introductions, conclusions, um, paragraph. You know what that sort of thing, and then what I consider to be like the third stage is, really could be anywhere from the last one to three years of high school. Literally, it can wait until the final year of high school if your child isn't ready until then, um, to just literally assign formal composition, working on essays.
Speaker 1:In Know and Tell I lay out a whole process for transitioning from written narration to writing essays. That process is laid out in there. You know when you begin and when you, you know, achieve, you know, complete facility with that process is just going to vary so much. You know, some kids are just natural writers, just like they're natural narrators, and at 11 or 12, you know, they're just all ready to go ahead and write long papers. Some kids at 15 are still struggling. So you, you know narration actually allows you to work with them where they are, to make progress, you know, and get them to that point where they're able to write fluently.
Speaker 1:And one of the things the experience is something I've seen happen so many times that I don't think it's an accident and of course I work with a lot of homeschoolers, and homeschoolers with their high schoolers often have a lot of younger students as well and the high schoolers are left on their own.
Speaker 1:They're independent learners. They can do a lot, but sometimes they don't get to formal composition at all and I've heard this same story so many times. Well, we did a written narration but we never did formal composition. And then all of a sudden my student went off to college and they got A's. Their professors gave them A's in writing because they know how to narrate, they know how to get their words down in writing and it's not that difficult, for you know a 16, 17, 18 year old who can write their thoughts down, you know on paper to very quickly pick up the conventions of how you know how that writing needs to be presented in a classroom situation and they're just prepared and ready to adapt their narration to the writing assignments they get in college. And I've heard that same story so many times. So narration, even without formal composition, very much prepares a student for college writing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, what I'm hearing is that the stages build upon themselves. So my student didn't start Charlotte Mason until he was form two, so he was fifth grade, maybe fourth grade, and so he had never done narration in this way. So do you suggest for kids that this is brand new, to like, that you kind of start those basic skills of telling and then kind of move into oral or written or narration, or is it okay to jump right into, whatever the age they are?
Speaker 1:I think it's important to begin with oral narration, no matter what age you're starting. But the difference is that an older student will become fluent at doing that much more quickly. They don't need three years, like a six-year-old needs three years, and so if you're introducing narration for the first time to an older student, I would suggest a period of oral narration only while they build an understanding of what narration is. But it's quite possible at older ages that they've already been doing writing, more writing you know in their school activities, and so you can introduce written narration more quickly. You know four weeks, six weeks, eight weeks, just depending on. You know when you want to bring it in and you may be able to go ahead and introduce the idea of written narration more frequently.
Speaker 1:You know you don't need to go once. Start with once a week. You may be able to go ahead and introduce the idea of written narration more frequently. You know you don't need to go once. Start with once a week. You may be able to go ahead and do it three times a week, five times a week. You know you can start narration at any point, even with a high schooler. It's not like too late, and that's because it is a natural human activity that we're just tapping into and kind of using in a more structured way.
Speaker 2:How do you go about introducing this to a child?
Speaker 1:I was going to ask the same thing okay, one of the things as like like, if you, if you're talking, if you're talking about like a six-year-old, like you probably probably never heard the word and so you know you really just started out by can you tell me back? Can you tell me? Can you tell me back? Can you tell me what can you tell me about what we just read and use that word tell. I suggest introducing the word narration in your everyday life, if you possibly can, in a homeschool setting with that oldest kid. Once you've got that child narrating, the younger ones are going to come along and they're going to already know what's expected. They're going to see it and they're going to understand.
Speaker 1:But you know, if your husband comes home and tells you what happens at work and you can say, oh, that was a great narration, you know. Or if your child comes in and starts telling you about this big, elaborate game or some movie, or heaven forbid, do they not always want to tell you what's happening in their video games? That's the narration story of my life, and just use the word I like that what it is that you're.
Speaker 1:You're asking them to do um with older students, I think, and it's really important that they understand the why behind what you're asking them to do, especially if they've been doing other academic work, and you're introducing narration as a new thing. If they understand the why behind it, that this is something that's going to help, you think, remember, make connections, they're more likely to at least be willing to try. The truth of the matter is, a lot of times kids don't like. They just don't like this, particularly, I think, in a homeschool setting where it's just the kid and mom all the time, back and forth, narrating. It's actually more dynamic and exciting. In a group setting Narration becomes because the relationship building aspect of it solidifies the group. They narrate with each other, to each other, they feed off each other's narrations. That can lead into discussion, and so it's probably less boring it. But here's what I, what I've learned. There's another thing that I've learned from experience narration works, even if they don't like it. Narration works even if they don't enjoy it.
Speaker 1:One of the things in one of the chapters in Know and Tell is I went to several young adults who had been educated Charlotte Mason style and they had used narration all their through their school. But now they were in college college grads, you know out doing things as adults, and I just asked them how did narration prepare you for what you're doing today? And they all you know they very kindly and graciously wrote me their you know experiences. I think almost every one of them said that they didn't necessarily like it, that they didn't enjoy it. A couple of them actually used the word hate. Those were my kids, I think. The other kids just didn't do that because I wasn't their mom, so they weren't that strong. But so they don't always enjoy it because it is such a mental labor it's interesting though, because you know so.
Speaker 3:my son has a teacher that comes to our house. She's amazing. She homeschooled five of her own kids using classical and char Mason methods, and so she cause we had some other teachers that came from, you know, brick and mortar school and it just wasn't the best fit for him. And so with her, and he'll tell me, I love to narrate with her, I love with Ms Wendy, but for you, I, you know, and I'm just he's like, cause you're my mom and I was like, but it should be exciting with me too. So I think there is, you know, and I'm just he's like, cause you're my mom and I was like, but it should be exciting with me too. So I think there is, you know, and if you're in a group setting or in a micro school and you have, you know, your friend running a micro school and you're, you're sending your child to them. Maybe they'll like it more because it's not you and you're.
Speaker 3:you know, because already as moms we're demanding our you know we have so many demands on our kids already, so I think sometimes in their mind it's like another demand, another, something else that we're telling them they have to do, whereas if they're having someone else tell them they're not used to, you know, they don't have the same amount of demands coming from that person. Maybe it has something to do with that, I don't know. No-transcript. Is narration going to be applied to all different subjects? Or how can it be applied to science, math, history? You know, is this something that you use in every single subject or is it just one particular subject?
Speaker 1:No, it's not just for one subject. You can narrate literally anything you know. You can even narrate in math. If you've ever asked your student, you know. Can you explain to me how you got this answer? Especially I had one student when he did algebra.
Speaker 1:He would he got the right answers and he showed nothing. He showed no work whatsoever. Showing your work is a kind of math narration. You're showing me the steps that you took to get there, but also explaining it orally. Tell me how you got this answer, how did you solve this problem? But I mean you can narrate and this is one of the ways where, if you are teaching different subjects, narration might take different forms.
Speaker 1:In science, it might be a perfectly legitimate way to narrate, to draw a diagram or make a table with information. That is a kind of narration as well. You know to collect it In. In some, in things like history, you know drawing a picture or acting it out. You know dramatizing something that's happened, setting up a model. You know it's not.
Speaker 1:These are, you know these are the kinds of activities that you sometimes see. You know in all kinds of school environments. You know make a diorama. That's a kind of narration too, you know, because you're showing or telling what you know, can narrate, and there's always a way of sharing or telling what you know about any subject. So you know, one of the things that Charlotte Mason often does in her schools and Charlotte Mason educators do today, is picture study, which looks like. I mean, it's a piece of visual art. So the child looks at a painting. Usually you know a famous or well-known painting, a prominent artist and then she would, just after they looked carefully at it she'd have them, you know put it away, turn it over and then tell what they saw. But a lot of times kids like to narrate their paintings in other ways, and so I've seen Lego models set up to look like such a good idea what they were seeing in the painting.
Speaker 1:I've seen dot like graph paper where they graphed a graph version of you know, either a detail in the painting or or a whole. Yeah, my son is sketched, take a graph like that yeah, he's sketched his perler beads or something and make a version of a painting your son likes to sketch what he sees.
Speaker 3:Well, yeah, he'll sketch, because we do picture study every Monday and sometimes he'll sketch or watercolor or clay. He's done clay models of some of the paintings and with Alviary they pick one artist per term and so he really gets to dive in, and they even did last year one of the terms he did a sculptor, so it wasn't just paintings and then he would sculpt them and I guess that's a form of narration that I never thought of.
Speaker 1:It absolutely is, and so there's really nothing. When you really kind of you know, start thinking about how you can tell somebody what you've learned, what you've seen, what you know, as I said, whether it's you know by talking or writing, or drawing.
Speaker 2:In Prenda we have a whole picture study section, especially for our littles, and a an artist like a people section. You know to talk about the artist and very charlotte mason inspired, and one of my favorite things that our kids do is just play like. Play like you are this painting. Play like you are this beautiful piece of music, you know, um. So it's like they'll bring in. It's like, well, I'm what was the other day, uh, they were doing something about charlemagne. This was a while ago and they were like playing charlemagne and like play like we, they, they had read something and then they were like acting it out, but not really like acting it out like a play, but they're just like acting like they're these people and being creative, and and I just thought like, oh, they're pulling out little details of like what they were just read and then they're like expressing that in their play. I'm like that's a really cool little callback that shows like, oh, I, I noticed that detail and I'm holding onto that. It's very fun.
Speaker 1:Right, and that's exactly what how narration can come out naturally with younger children. But even older kids, like you say, they may want to play at what they've had, and sometimes with special needs children, you will see that that they are processing the things that they've learned and that will come out in their play. I have a friend with a special needs child who had some pretty serious speech issues and delays and so narration, just normal spoken narration, was difficult for them, but she was reading him, I think it was. She was reading Pilgrim's Progress and there was one particular episode in there where a couple of the characters are trapped by falling into a pit and she found him in their backyard and he was digging a pit and she realized that he was in a sense narrating the story in his play that they had read from the thing. And so, yeah, narration, there's really no limits on how it can be applied. It's as creative as students and teachers want to be. It can take almost any form that human communication can take.
Speaker 3:I love this so much so we could keep talking about all things Charlotte Mason narration, but we do need to wrap up. So this is a question we ask all of our guests. Karen, so who is someone who has kindled your love of learning, or curiosity, motivation, passion? If you could totally pick Charlotte Mason, it sounds like she has really inspired you.
Speaker 1:Me. Charlotte Mason is one. She has one of the deepest and broadest minds her thought that I've ever encountered from anybody that I've ever read. It's been a process of mine, ongoing, and I guarantee you I will never catch up but to read what Charlotte Mason read. And so she has those six thick books that she wrote herself, but within them are references to scores and scores and scores of other books and works that she read or was familiar with. And I've kind of gone behind her and, as I said, I will never catch up and read the things that she read and I, the more I read outside of her and I come back and I read and I'm like just so fascinated by how well she understood and integrated other people's thought into her basic, fundamental understanding. It's so impressive to see so like charlotte mason's.
Speaker 2:Like 1840s in england. Um maria montessori. Like 1870s, italy. Uh, jean piaget similar time frame, can't remember the exact same years but they all kind of come together with the same kind of like deep respect for the child. The child is a whole person. You know, like this connection, like learning, is social learning, like all of it. They kind of come to these same conclusions and create these different streams where, like, a lot of people still hundreds of years later, like, like, are really living into these principles.
Speaker 2:Meanwhile, in the united states we're inventing public education and it's like so vastly different and they're just like these little threads of people in the united states who have held on to some of in the homeschooling world or in the classical education world. It's just like, oh, it is time for these ideas to like be the norm already. So, so we can have, we can have generations of kids who are grounded and rooted and, like really know who they are and are thinkers. So thank you so much for coming on. Oh, one last question how can learners learn more about your work? Where can we find your books and things?
Speaker 1:Okay, I do. I do have a website, caringglassnet just those 10 letters, caringglassnet. So there's like I have a blog. I have a blog on there. I sometimes I honestly don't update that site. Real often my books are on can be found on Amazon. You know everything's available through Amazon and some other. You know everything's available through.
Speaker 2:Amazon and some other other. Okay, Well, we'll get all those links in the description so people can find you easily. Thank you so much for coming on the Kindle podcast. This has been awesome.
Speaker 3:Well, thanks so much for inviting me. I've enjoyed talking to you. That's it for today. We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Kindle podcast. If it was helpful to you like, subscribe and go follow us on social at Prenda Learn. If you have a question you'd like for us to address, all you need to do is email podcast at Prendacom and you can also go to our website, wwwPrendacom, and you can sign up for the weekly newsletter, the.
Speaker 2:Sunday Spark, the Kindle podcast, is brought to you by Prenda. Prenda makes it easy for you to start and run an amazing micro school based on all of the ideas we talk about here on the Kindled podcast. If you want more information about becoming a Prenda guide, just go to Prendacom. Thanks for listening and remember to keep kindling.
