Recall

In a Charlotte Mason education the child's main work is narration.  No fill-in-the-blanks, or scan the text to answer the questions,  just narration. It sounds "easy" until you actually try it yourself, and then you realise that there is a lot of brain effort involved in ordering, sequencing, recalling, absorbing the language, and so on. The material becomes owned by the child in that way.

In Charlotte's PNEU schools the children would take exams at the end of every term, but they would do NO revision for them.

The trick to getting the information to stick in the children' mind is both narration AND constant review. At the beginning of every new lesson you must review what was covered in the previous lesson...and in the lesson before that....and before that. Not all the way to the beginning necessarily, but enough of the way back that the current lesson stands on a solid foundation and is linked to the previous lessons. That way the child builds up a deep and rich tapestry of linked knowledge in their mind.


Charlotte said, “Let every lesson gain the child’s entire attention, and let each new lesson be so interlaced with the last that the one must recall the other; that again, recalls the one before it, and so on to the beginning” (Vol. 1, p. 158).

You can read more here.