Ambleside Online – Written Narration

We’ve completed our second week of school, our second week of using Ambleside Online, and all is well.

Michaela’s first written narration attempt was so cute, folded up like a little love letter and slipped into my “in box” on the Narration Station. I want longer entires with more details, but no way will I be too critical on this first attempt!  She did it with willingness and seems to be enjoying this particular book very much.  I believe as we go along, the written narrations will improve and we’ll find more and more ways to incorporate written narration.

I have already found two ways of incorporating narration: one will be her art appreciation notebook and another will be her timeline.

As we cover people and events in our reading, I am providing images to Michaela. (One more reason to love old, tattered history books from the thrift store.) Each image is glued onto a note card where she can write down information, dates, copywork, or narration and then the whole card can be trimmed of excess and glued onto the time line. The timeline is a series of 8-1/2 x 11 art pages taped together. This will easily come down at the end of the year where it can be folded accordian style and glued into her end-of-year notebook.

The thought of written narration has mae me really excited about all we can put on the timeline. Why can’t narration and even copywork be glued onto the timeline for us to see regularly? 

One of the facets of Ambleside Online that I have not written much about is the artist study. Each term of every year one artist is studied. There is a group online that has links to PDF images (so kindly put up by one of the members — thank you) for personal school use. I copied the files to a CD and had them printed onto beautiful 8-1/2 x 11 glossy photo paper for around 1 dollar each.

Michaela now has an art notebook in which these will be kept in clear protectors. Michaela put them into the protectors and then the notebook yesterday, in the order she wanted, and we talked about the name of each painting.

Her art appreciation notebook will be another way to implement narration and copywork. The only way she will truly remember about Raphael and these paintings is to read about them, talk about them and look at them. I will assign narration and copywork related to this art throughout the term and she can put it into her notebook to refer back to.

We have done an art wall in the past, but I think including copywork and narration in a notebook will help Michaela learn the artist even better.

I feel like we are really getting into a nice routine here, but we need to step up the reading. I’ve been very relaxed this first two weeks, allowing us two weeks to do one week’s worth of reading. (The assigments are plenteous!)

To complicate our already busy schedule, Michaela, as she put it, “messed up her peace sign” this week.

Yes, her left index finger fell victim to a backyard stunt that went terribly wrong and we spent an evening in the ER, didn’t get to bed until after midnight, and slept late the next morning. 

In a nutshell, she tried to jump through a seat-swing hanging from a swingset (running, by the way), got her finger tangled in the rope which twisted her, by her finger, so hard that it threw her to the ground, abraded all the skin off the underside of her finger and made her finger turn blue and become as big as her brother’s finger.  I think she thought that last part was cool, if it weren’t for the pain.  We’ve been icing and buddy-taping and waiting to see the orthopedist to make sure there’s no hairline fracture around a growth plate.

Hopefully we’ll be even more on track with reading next week. Real construction began on the potting shed today, so I’ll be putting up pictures soon. We have science experiements to talk about, and more! Until then…

Happy Saturday!