purplemama Posted December 8, 2008 Share Posted December 8, 2008 It seems to me that I must be doing something wrong because my kids just do not "get" narration and I am totally frustrated. For example, I am using the Writing with Ease workbook for year 2 with my 7 year old daughter. If I ask her the questions to help her summarize the passage, and she can give me the correct answers, she never really makes the leap to being able to summarize the passage in two sentences. She says, "I can't" and this leads to me saying "You just did it." and asking her the questions again and helping her to make them into one or two complete sentences. I feel like I am doing the work for her. Am I expecting too much from 7 year old? I really think she should be able to do this. With my son, I have the opposite problem. He seems to have a never ending memory capacity for even the smallest detail of stories and tends to want to include every detail he remembers, including word for word retellings of parts of a story with particularly colorful language. He can't boil the passage down into two or three sentences. Does anyone have any suggestions for how to deal with these two problems. I'm tired of hearing "I can't" from my children regarding one of the cornerstones of our educational philosophy! Jennifer Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jean in Newcastle Posted December 8, 2008 Share Posted December 8, 2008 My ds wasn't able to summarize until 4th or 5th grade. I just let him narrate in all his full detail until then. It takes special skills to be able to cull out the most important details and to then distill it into just a few sentences. Maybe others can do it earlier than that but I know that if I had insisted on my ds doing it he would have been frustrated and would have learned to hate it. BTW he is a very good writer now. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Snickerdoodle Posted December 8, 2008 Share Posted December 8, 2008 For my 7 yo I have him summarize after very short passages. For example in SOTW 1, I would have him summarize after 1 or two of those short paragraphs. I work on having him tell me the main point of the paragraph in one sentence because he can sometimes tell me almost verbatim what I read. That's not summarizing. He needs to be able to think about what he just heard and make a decision as to what was the most important point of it. It's a skill and I think the small kiddos have to work up to it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Snickerdoodle Posted December 8, 2008 Share Posted December 8, 2008 I will add that my goal for this year (second grade) is to read one section of the SOTW 2 and have him summarize that. Those are fairly short passages. But like I said, we are working up to that. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cedarmom Posted December 8, 2008 Share Posted December 8, 2008 Summarizing is a differant skill than narrating. My son didn't get summarizing until he was 11 or so. If your kids are able to tell about what they read, then you're doing great! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kokotg Posted December 8, 2008 Share Posted December 8, 2008 My 7 yo is a very reluctant narrator, too. We're working on WWE level 2 as well, and it's slow going but I am seeing improvement. When he's stuck, I sometimes suggest a first word for the sentence ("start with 'The horses...'") and that often unlocks his brain a bit. For right now, I don't do any formal narrations other than WWE and probably won't anytime soon. I ask informally when we read history or whatever, "so what was happening yesterday in the book?" but I don't put any pressure on it at all. I guess I'm just keeping the faith that it will come in time :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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