Many of you may be familiar with Charlotte Mason. She was a strong advocator of narration in a child's education. She may have actually been the first who had her students creating narrative notebooks.

Your students could do a notebook on a book they are reading with narrations from each chapter, or they could write their own history book of narrations from each time frame as they study it. Another idea would be a reading notebook where each book they read could be narrated and placed into genre (types of reading) sections. For example, a biography on Thomas Jefferson would be placed in the biography section. Little House on the Prairie narration would be placed under the section of historical fiction.

You will first need a notebook of some sort. I usually prefer the 3-ring notebooks with the clear pockets on the outside so that the child can develop their own cover and insert it, but I have also used the 3-prong folders for certain books. Whatever you chose, you will want it to be easy to add to throughout a school year or longer.

English, Elizabeth, Individualized Reading, 1996, Creative Teaching Press, CTP 3331, Grades 3-6 (Ideas for the Spelling Notebook came from this source.)

(I am sure there are many books on these types of notebooks, but truthfully, I read from these sources or had some college projects that inspired me to develop narration notebook ideas for my girls. All of our forms I've developed for these notebooks can be found at the site listed below.)