Reason of Flashbacks

[Aprilinga]

O.K.,
I have been reading the sample of Homer and am wondering what are the reasons for having your child to write in the way? I mean long term reasons. I am trying to get the big picture of what you ladies are working on and before I dive into this full throttle, I just need some more insight. I have CW Aesop and Poetry and like them both. Especially Aesop for the younger kids. I love the way you take a piece of Literature and analyze it, use it for copy work and dication. This has helped me get a framework in my mind of how we can combine these areas this year instead of having piece meal in our Language Arts.

Maybe it is because I am caught between two ideas of writing here. 1. from the Principle Approach being that you are trying to get your child to reason from the reading and apply it somehow to his life and to reason biblical principles from the readings. 2) Narrating and retelling and dressing these summaries up to allow the child to get used to various styles and techniques. I love dictation and completely understand its importance.

Again, I think I just need someone to help me see the big picture with where all of this is going.

Thanks
April

[Lene Mahler Jaqua]

This is a great question, April. And you're not the only one asking it.

Flashbacks and writing backwards have gotten some raised eyebrows amongst the people editing or piloting our work on the progymnasmata.

Now, first the great literary reasons: Homer himself uses the "in media res", in the middle of things, flashback in his Odyssey and in his Iliad. It is an elegant way of starting your narrative, capturing the audience's attention with an eventful scene, and then flashbacking to show WHY our hero is in the mess he is in. - Likewise, a story told entirely backwards can be an interesting literary technique, much akin to what is done in detective stories, where we see the murder and then we watch Columbo reconstruct the crime from clues.

These techniques are hard for children to master because children very much live in their own minds, they know what they know and often they just assume that their reader also knows what they know, whether they state it explicitly or not. When writing a flashback or writing a narrative backwards, the students are forced to think carefully about where they say what, to note if anything is left out. WHen writing backwards, in essence, they are playing the role of a detective reconstructing the events of the narrative which lead to the conclusion... which i s shown in the initial paragraph. IOW these types of stories really stretch our students' logical and sequential skills.

In fact, I would venture to guess that most of the students' will not write as well written or as smooth a story as the one they would be capable of if they were writing a straight forward narrative. THIS is OK, in writing the PROCESS of getting there can be just as important as the end product. We are stretching "writing muscles" and "logic muscles" here.

With these two exercises, we are helping the students see reasoning the way it most often HAS to occur, which is, we have an event. How can we reconstruct what happened? This happens in science AND in history. Most of this sort of reasoning lies behind almost everything we do in those two fields.

When your student begins these exercises you will realize how difficult they are, how much hand holding you will have to do not to discourage a young writer, BUT they are fun, AND they are very worthwhile doing.

My students began those with well known stories... like Little Red Riding Hood. F.ex. start where the woodcutter lets Gramma and Red out of the wolf's stomach, move backwards. It is easiest to begin with stories which the student knows backwards and forwards because then he is not struggling with remembering every detail of the story line.

Lene

[Aprilinga]

Thanks Lena. This helps me a little. Having never done this before myself, I guess I will not fully understand until I walk through the steps. This seems to be the way it is with everything Huh?

Going back to the heart of my questions and that is trying to apply this to my year plan for next year; I could use models such as events in Ivanhoe, events in the story of the Pilgrims and Revolutionary War, right? After we study a person in history, couldn't we highlight some "main" events and retell "Homer" style adding our dress-ups and focusing on grammar being studied? Or do we always have to use a certain "model" of literature that has all of the events contained in so many words?

One more question. Do you necessarily have to use the model for dictation and writing? What I am thinking here is that using my example above of studying a person in history, we would be writing about him. There may be pages or even many books that we have read about his life. We would outline key events that we may want to focus in on and using what we have read and maybe recorded about those events write our narrative. I also want to have my son key in on character qualities and Biblical principles so I would have him include these in his paper as well. After this process, we could decide which way to write the narratice, backwards ect..and then proceed with the process of producing the paper. If we did this one week, I would just choose a dictation piece not related. Does this sound right? Am I making any sense? It hard to communicate sometimes through this process of writing. Arrrrrg! The entire reason we need to be practicing. Right?

What I am thinking is that our writing assignments and our dictation pieces may not always correlate.

Thank you SOOOOOOO much. You are being VERY helpful.
April

[Lene Mahler Jaqua]

Yes, it takes doing. My encouragement to moms, which often gets me in trouble, is "don't just have your kids write this stuff, YOU write it with them". It is usually met with a long list of all that any one given mom has to do and how she cannot make time for this. But really, HOW can we teach writing to children, if we don't spend time learning to write, first, or at least, alongside of them? - CW Homer spells out in great detail how to do these assignments, step-by-step.

As for models, use what you want. It is easier BY FAR to start those in media res and backwards retellings with short fables or fairy tales. You "should" start by using narratives your children know well, because the familiarity of the content allows them to focus on the technique of re-arranging the story. -- If the content and the arrangement of the story are both alien, the assignment might well be too big of a bite to chew all at once.- Once your student has done one or two of those assignments, then , by all means, choose a passage from Ivanhoe or whatever novel you are reading. The key is, that the narrative must be self-contained with a beginning, a middle, and an end to work properly for re-arrangement.

As for whether you MUST use the model for everything. Absolutely not!! If you have a great biography ready for dictation or practice in punctuation, use it, if you want to. CW is just a guideline.

There are advantages to using the same model mostly consistently for the week, and that is that you analyze every aspect of it, become very familiar with it, and therefore really understand the underlying grammatical, logic, and rhetorical components of that model. So weigh that concern against your desire to use something else, and balance it as you see fit. --

Lene

[Aprilinga]

Lene,

Thank you. I thing I am getting a better picture here. I think probably the way it will work at our house is that some weeks we will have the dictation come from a model we are working on and other weeks it will be from a literature of subject related source. These weeks we will be working on writing projects that are not really related to "Homer". I like having a variety of choices for our writing assignments.

You know you are exactly right about Mom needing to write as well and as soon as I read that part of your post, I thought "What are you kidding me! With the baby and the toys and the noise and the math and the husband and the spelling and the....." But I do that I need to be writing SOME so that I can understand the process myself that I am trying to teach. So thanks for this reminder. I am thinking that if I can maybe just write one for his every four or five, that would be a good step. Better than nothing at all. I can't believe that I am getting a little excited about writing. But the thought of actually having some time to write does sound fun. I just have never really thought about doing this. I am always just so busy trying to get things done with the kids..

Thanks for the reminder. I will keep you posted.
April