Wednesday, August 27, 2008

School Update

School has been going pretty well. It does help our day go better to have a more definite schedule.

Yesterday Pauly did his first "retelling." This is pretty similar to the Charlotte Mason idea of "narration." The idea is that you read the story, or passage, or whatever, to the child, then they tell it back to you. The idea is to check understanding, work on listening well the first time, and develop verbal skills that will be helpful in later writing. The MODG syllabus broke this up into a few different steps, which helped us make it successful. We'd tried this last year with no luck at all, he refused to do anything.

So, we read one of Aesop's Fables. I chose the Tortoise and the Hare, because I figured it would be easier for Pauly if he was already familiar with the story, and I wasn't sure how cooperative he'd be. After I read it to him, he copied the title onto a page in his blank book, then drew an illustration. Considering the fact that he does not draw at all in his free time, he did well and surprisingly there were no complaints. Then he retold the story to me, dictating it while I wrote in down on the page opposite to his illustration. By the end of the year, he'll have a book Aesop's Fables, with his own retellings and illustrations.

I was quite pleased with this. It was a fair amount of work for Pauly, seeing as handwriting and drawing are difficult for him and are not favorite activities. However, it wasn't overwhelmingly difficult, just some work. He is proud of having done it as well. The syllabus calls for us to do something similar with lives of the saints throughout the year as well, so I'm glad it will be doable!

2 comments:

  1. That sounds very cool! Glad to hear that Pauly is taking his school work seriously and things are going well.

    Ginger Gramma

    ReplyDelete
  2. I may have to follow that basic idea for narration, because narration just hasn't been working too well at our house. Sounds like a good approach.

    ReplyDelete

What do you think? Let me know.