Narration is such a wonderful method for learning. Read or listen to a passage from a living book,

and then retell that passage in your own words. That skill sets your student up for self-educating

her entire life, but it gets even better. That skill also prepares your student for written composition, because at some point your student

will be ready to take the next step in narrating and transition to writing her narrations.

It's an important milestone.

So let's talk about that process.

Welcome to the Simply Charlotte Mason podcast. I'm Sonia Schaefer. I find it enlightening

that Charlotte Mason referred to oral narration as oral composition. When you think about it, that's exactly what it is. When you are given

the assignment to write a composition, do you immediately start writing? No. First, you do a lot

of mental work. You review what you know about the topic. You determine what points you want

to cover and in what order. You sometimes mix

in your own opinion on a certain aspect of that topic. And then you try to hold on to those

thoughts and put them together into coherent sentences and finally write them down. That's a lot of

mental work before the pencil ever touches the paper. And Charlotte

Mason recognized that important mental work. At the same time, she recognized that young

students would hit an additional mountain of mental work once the pencil did touch the paper. Students in grades 1 through

3 usually have to focus on how to form the letters they are writing, when to put in a

capital letter or a period or a question mark. Plus, they're still learning how to spell

most of the words they are writing. Charlotte realized that if the student turned the focus of her mind onto those mechanics,

the mental process of working with the knowledge itself, the narrating and making personal relations with that knowledge would suffer.

So in grades 1 through 3, we keep the mental process personal relations with that knowledge would suffer.

So in grades 1 through 3, we keep the mental process but remove the written challenge

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