Retelling Narratives

[Melissa in Jordan]

Dear Lene and Tracy,

I am attempting to take my three oldest children through the narrative exercises of the progym and I have a couple of questions regarding the retelling of the narrative. I realize the outline that you posted, Lene, was only meant to be a rough outline but I am wondering if you recommend retelling the narrative in another way besides the exercise of inverting it/starting in the middle. What about condensing? expanded? slanted? per D'Angelo and others.

We have been attempting all of these, in some fashion, but I am finding that it takes two weeks, minimum to get through one narrative. By that time my kids are moaning at the thought of pulling out the same narrative one more time! I thought of changing to a one narrative/one week schedule and varying the exercises with each narrative. Any feedback is appreciated.

This is my planning week before diving into our next quarter so I am trying to get all the kinks in my approach worked out.

Warmly,
Melissa

[Lene in CO]

Good questions, Melissa.

My sketchy outline of Homer does not contain everything

Yes, we will be doing summaries (condensations all the way down to precis) and also amplifications. Slants we will be reserving for confirmation /refutation. It seems a good time to do those, and the narrative Homer volume is already on its way to being large. We have to keep it simple and easy to use and affordable to print. Also, too many skills to work on in the same volume means not enough time to master each skill.

Lene

[Tracy Gustilo]

Absolutely, you do not have to do every possible narrative permutation with every model story. Mix and match. :-)

Tracy

[Melissa in Jordan]

Thank you for your input Lene and Tracy. And thanks for the "permission" to leave out the slanted retelling for now. Given the writing ability of my two boys, this will be a welcome repreive for them and will help us to focus on mastery.

Another question regarding the inverted/start in the middle retelling: Does this need to be rewritten, backward, for example, sentence by sentence or can it be done paragraph by paragraph or part by part? My boys are struggling with this exercise in particular and I thought this might simplify things for them if they didn't have to be concerned with every individual sentence/idea being in exact reverse order. I hope I'm making sense.

Thanks again for your help. I guess my youngest will get the full benefit of this progym adventure since I am muddling through it with my older three!

Melissa

[Lene in CO]

Good morning, Melissa

As far as the re-ordered sequence goes, we do not do it sentence by sentence.

My children choose a narrative, usually one longer than a regular Aesop fable. They construct a summary sentence outline of the model narrative. Usually each summary sentence covers a paragraph (but since paragraphs are a modern construct it is not always helpful to think in terms of paragraphs. The summary sentence covers a section of the narrative which deals with a specific sub topic) THEN we shuffle arond the order of the points in the outline (either start in the middle or start at the end).... when all the summary sentences are in place for that new outline, THEN we

1. Amplify the sentences and possibly split them into several sentence
2. fill in the narrative with transitional sentences. These are very important since we shuffled the order around and not everything might "flow" from sentence to sentence, and some things may not be clear since we started in the middle. Also, some things may need to be omitted as redundant because of this reshuffling.

It is important, when reshuffling to realize that a story always needs some element of surprise, some revelation. For a story which is told from beginning to end, the ending itself is usually the surprise.

For a story which is told from the middle , then flashback to the beginning, then the end, the flashback and the end BOTH provide that element (f.ex. Homer's Odyssey).

For a story which is told from the end to the beginning, that element of surprise needs to be inserted, artfully. It is like an Agatha Christi novel, where you see the murder but you don't know "whodunnit". You work your way back to reconstruct motives and details for a complete picture. Paul Harvey artfullly does this with "the rest of the story". He tells a narrative (forwards or backwards) about a seemingly unkonwn person, then makes that final tie in and you know the story was about Elvis, JFK, or someone else famous, though for most of the story, to you, it was about "John Q Citizen".

Lene

[Melissa in Jordan]

Thank you, Lene. The clouds are beginning to part and a few more rays of sun are shining through:). This will be helpful when we get back to work next week. This planning week is passing much too quickly.

Melissa