Know and Tell
The art of narration — the deceptively simple practice that replaces quizzes, worksheets, and dread.
Find it at Living Book PressAffiliate link — a small thank-you to us if you buy through it, at no cost to you.
What it's about
Narration — the child telling back what was read — is the engine of a Charlotte Mason education, and this is the first full book devoted to it. Glass explains why the telling is the knowing, then walks through the practice from a six-year-old's first fumbling retell to a teenager's written essays.
It's the most immediately practical book on our shelf: you can read a chapter at breakfast and change how lessons go by lunch.
The ideas worth carrying away.
Telling is knowing
The act of composing what you've taken in — ordering it, wording it, owning it — is not a test of learning. It is the learning. What can't be told hasn't yet been known.
Start clumsy and stay patient
First narrations are halting and strange, and that's the process working. Resist prompting, resist correcting mid-tell; fluency arrives on its own schedule, and it arrives.
Narration scales to essay
The path from 'tell me about the paragraph' to a well-formed written essay is one unbroken road. Oral narration is composition practice years before a pencil gets involved.
One reading, full attention
Knowing a passage will be narrated — and won't be re-read — trains the habit of attention better than any exhortation to 'focus.' The method quietly does the discipline for you.
Who it's for
- Parents replacing comprehension worksheets with something humane
- Homeschoolers whose children freeze when asked to narrate
- Teachers of writing who wonder where good essays actually come from
About the author
Karen Glass homeschooled her four children in Poland over more than twenty years and is a founding member of the AmblesideOnline advisory. She writes about the meeting point of classical education and Charlotte Mason's philosophy.