Homeschooling Again???

I guess it's not hard to figure out what has been occupying my time. I had been worrying about my youngest son's narrations. It bothered me that they weren't more complete. Of course he's only six so that should be taken into consideration. Still, it bothered me until recently. I read on one of the groups I belong to where some other mother was having trouble with her 10 year old's narrations as well. A woman who had been at this longer than we have answered in an attempt to help her.

What she had to say was simple but it changed the way that we handle narrations. She said basically it may make you crazy but you need to remember it's not your narration, it's your child's. You can encourage them and help them to get more complete but they are always going to talk about what is important to them. It may not be what's important to you, but again it's not your narration.

From that point on, it was like a light went on. I backed off and gave my son more room. Instead of saying that's not complete enough you need to tell me more, I started saying "And then what happened? How do you think he felt about that?" and so on. A funny thing happened after that; he started narrating better on his own.

Recently we were studying about Hezekiah being granted a longer life. When we were done he started his narration. It went like this:

"There was this king . . ." "Hezekiah?" Yeah that's right! And he got sick and was going to die. So God sent someone to tell him that he was going to die." "Isaiah?" "Yeah Isaiah. He told King Hezekiah that he would die. The king got so sad that he prayed and God changed his mind and sent that prophet Isaiah back to tell him that he changed his mind." "Then what happened?" "Then to prove that it would happen he told the king to pick which way the clock thing would go. He told Isaiah that it should go backward and it did and he lived more years."

Not bad for a 6 year old and quite a lot better than he was doing a couple of months ago. I know we shouldn't brag but boy am I proud of how far he has come.