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Beginning levels of CC

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    Beginning levels of CC

    I just purchased fable/narrative for my 10 year old to work through. I have been homeschooling since august and know I will have him the rest of this 4th grade school year and 5th grade. Starting now with fable and accelerating it to one lesson a week (read it, synonyms and variations/ outline one day, oral narration and one retell variation day 2, reduction 3rd day and synonym sentences with 4th day for polished typed variation as retold by him). We will complete lessons 1-6, 8-9 and 20. Moving on to narrative every lesson from there. If that goes well then maybe beginning chreia and maxim level. I know the program builds and students reap the maximum benefit after years of time put into the progym.

    Will doing only the first two levels of CC even be very beneficial?

    Also I am a bit confused about the outlining. It seems like a huge outline for such a short fable. It seems every sentence is wanted and nearly word for word including the majority of the dialogue. It feels like IEW with every sentence but with way more words. My kid is naturally paraphrasing and putting it into his own words. His outline is looking pretty short if left to his own devices.

    Yes, even two years of a great curriculum is beneficial! It is perfectly fine to accelerate, as long as your student is of the typical writing level.

    As far as the outline goes, it is only a TOOL, not something that we spend a lot of time on. It is a tool so that students have the whole story broken away from the paragraph form, in order to facilitate careful paraphrasing, because otherwise a student will (as you noted) cut out a LOT of detail.
    So, if I have an outline that says:

    I. An Ant
    A. Running on the forest floor
    B. Looking for food
    C. Noticed a Chrysalis

    If a student writes, "An ant was looking for food when he saw a Chrysalis," I would have the student redraft based on too many vocabulary and phrasing similarities, not enough of the student's own words and expression, and it is shorter than the original, removing detail. The outline serves as a check to ensure that the student isn't leaving out whole points, but the outline is not the while story sentence by sentence in whole phrases.
    Feel free to GIVE your student the outline or most of it, or white out parts that he/she needs to fill in. It is the "check" for "did I remove the detail of the story?" I usually tell my kids "did you paraphrase to the same degree of detail or beyond that of the original?" It is a good rule of thumb.