Has the art of recitation gone out of vogue? I can remember as a schoolgirl being taught to recite mnemonics that would help with spelling or pronunciation of words newly encountered: “When two vowels go walking the first one does the talking,” we were taught to say. I remember as early as first or second grade, being taught how to make a formal introduction and the class having to practice it until we all had it right for parent-teacher night. I remember, too, being assigned a Shakespeare soliloquy to learn in high school. I never attended a school in which students were made to recite addition facts or times tables mechanically, but we did repeat a number of French verbs over and over until we knew them. And later this was the way we learned to decline our Latin nouns.

Recitation is a tool long used in education, but one I suspect has fallen out of use in today’s schools. Yes rote memorization of facts can be quite boring, and it has lost favour among teachers who understand learning that takes place in a meaningful context is more likely to be effective. All the same, there are certain things that really do have to be memorized in the long run. Addition facts and times tables, grammatical facts such as the gender of a given noun in a foreign language, the conjugation of an irregular verb, irregular spellings in English. Even if a mnemonic device is used to make the learning easier, these things really are being committed to memory so they can be quickly recalled on command when needed.

Memory is not much emphasized among young people today. We have computers, hand-held devices and calculators to do our work for us. Some schools are actually teaching kids in first grade to use a calculator to do their math for them; later on college professors are frustrated at the large number of their students who cannot solve a simple arithmetic problem without the aid of a calculator. Many adults can’t balance their own cheque books. We program important phone numbers into our phones, so we won’t have to remember them. When the electricity goes out shopkeepers caught without a calculator are unable to do business until the power is restored.

Our ancestors used their memory much more effectively than we do today, especially in the times before widespread literacy. They remembered facts and recipes, did mental computations, and committed whole histories to memory. We may have made our lives more convenient with all of our technological innovations, but we also have a whole generation of young people who are not learning to rely on their own mental abilities because something outside of them can do the work just as easily. I wonder, with our growing concern over memory loss in aging, can it do us any good as older folks to have neglected the exercise of our memories as young people?

But my concern for the art of recitation is not solely about the mechanics of what our young people might be missing. It’s also about the loss of an art. If you have ever had the pleasure of listening to a talented orator speak, or a classically trained actor deliver a particularly challenging monologue, you are appreciating the art of recitation. If we take into consideration that the quote just above was written in the 1880’s, and think how much more capable our own parents or grandparents were at doing things like mental computation and memorization, it does cause us to ask how much worse off our own generation and our children’s are.

Schoolchildren have traditionally been made to learn a piece such as “In Flanders Fields” or the Gettysburg Address, but this seems to be less a priority these days. One reaction I commonly encounter when I discuss recitation - and this goes back some decades to my own high school days - is that it’s just too difficult for kids to learn a poem or a speech. If your kids are anything like mine, it doesn’t take much to know this in not true. Find any subject that is of interest to your child, and ask him about it. Whether it be music or Hollywood movies, sports or animals, your child is likely to be a goldmine of information about this subject. Children can rattle off statistics, summarize the plots of a dozen movies, and sing you all their favourite songs, and even recite tracts of text they’ve learned from reading or watching documentaries about a subject of special interest.

Yes, children recite naturally! The word recite comes to us from the Latin, and it literally means to summon forth again. In other words to store information and later recall it. Kids are practicing recitation when they learn nursery rhymes, or how to sing their ABC’s. Hearing something interesting over and over again - especially in a fun, informal setting - makes it very easy for kids to commit it to memory. This is essentially what Charlotte Mason called for when she prescribed recitation as one of the components of a good education: she had learned that any number of things could be committed to memory if they were read to a child in a rather informal manner, especially if this were done when the child was preoccupied with some other activity such as combing his hair.

The Charlotte Mason method for learning recitation is simply to choose a selection appropriate to the child, and to read it aloud at various times. Repeat it at odd times of the day until the child begins to say it along with you, and continue to do this until he can say the entire piece by himself. For good measure, it’s best to return to pieces already learned every now and again so they aren’t forgotten as new ones are learned. A good way of scheduling readings is described at Simply Charlotte Mason. They refer specifically to memorizing scripture but this system will work for anything from nursery rhymes, to inspirational quotations or song lyrics, to poetry.

Even very young children like to hear beautiful words, and they are capable of learning anything they can understand. Spending just a few minutes at a time, up to five or ten minutes a day, will yield surprising results. A two- or three-year-old can learn nursery rhymes with little effort. An older child can learn a poem from her literature selection, or the lyrics to a folk song. After a few days or a week the child will be able to recite the piece by himself, and this with pride! My youngest (not quite four) likes to show off when grown-ups come to visit. Now, Ms Mason would have us wait until a child is six to begin any formal training including recitation, but if you think of how even younger children easily learn to recite a suitable selection like a nursery rhyme or fingerplay, you can see that asking older children to learn to recite from memory is not such a huge or daunting task.

Recitation has several benefits for our children. It exposes them to quality literature (poems, songs, speeches, scripture, etc.) and allows them not only to appreciate but to emulate the patterns that they best enjoy. Like oral narration it also prepares them for public speaking, which could mean anything from delivering an oral presentation to an examiner or taking a job interview, to giving a toast at a formal occasion or speaking before a large audience. Recitation gives our children a repertoire of suitable pieces from which to draw if called upon to speak without time for preparation. It familiarizes them with patterns (e.g. meter, rhyming scheme) common in verse, and also with expressions used in the past that may seem archaic today. Mastering a recitation is a source of pride and self-confidence. Learning a variety of pieces allows a young person to expand vocabulary and to “try on” different idioms or styles of diction.

One of the things we teach our children at the Freehold is that not so very long ago, people had to rely on themselves for their entertainment. There was no internet, no television or film; go back far enough and there wasn’t even radio. People learned to sing, to play an instrument, to dance - and yes, to recite. One of my best loved fictional characters, Anne Shirley, had learned several pieces of poetry “by heart” before she arrived at Green Gables. After passing her entrance exam to Queen’s Academy, Anne recites “A Maiden’s Vow” at a benefit concert in White Sands (in the Kevin Sullivan movie, the piece selected is “The Highwayman.”) This is an excellent demonstration of the use of recitation as a form of entertainment.

I would encourage parent-educators and classroom teachers alike to find a few minutes for recitation in their daily lessons. As do narration and copywork, it offers a great deal of value for our children, for a relatively small investment of time and effort. It is both a pleasure, as a parent, to hear our children delivering a beautiful recitation, and a source of pride that our little ones are well on their way to becoming well educated ladies and gents who will have a skill that has grown rare in our time. In the words of Charlotte Mason:

This work was created by Ruby of Freehold 2, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.

Excerpts copyright quoted authors. Please visit their sites to read more, and respect the terms of their copyrights. Thanks!

I get a lot of links to educational resources, especially web sites where parents and educators can find free printables or interactive games for learning to read, to do arithmetic, etc. There are a good number of quality resources that kids like, so I don’t usually make a big deal about a glitzy computer game that teaches. Especially if it’s being offered for a fee.

That being said, I really wanted to tell my readers about Timez Attack. It is honestly one of the best resources I’ve been sent this year, and I’m willing to bet that anyone who has kids learning multiplication will be as impressed with it as I am. Timez Attack is a maze-style game that could easily compete with any kids’ game you have for your Nintendo, X-Box or PlayStation. The folks at Big Brainz usually make high-end video games, and let me tell you, they haven’t spared any of the sophistication when it comes to this educational game!

Aimed at kids who are learning their times tables, the game begins in a dungeon-like scenario where the player first learns how to navigate using the mouse and keyboard. Once navigation is established, the player moves through the dungeon towards a series of doors that each challenge him with a multiplication problem. Once the correct answer is given, the door will open and an ogre will continue to challenge the player with more problems. If the challenge is met, the player wins the key that will open the next door. He then navigates to another door, where the process is repeated.

My description may be oversimplifying the game a bit much, so I suggest that you view the How to Play video to get a good introduction to what goes on in the game play. What I’d like to point out in the meantime is that this game is well designed, from an academic as well as a gaming point of view. Some of the highlights are:

• The game covers multiplication facts from 2-12;
• Each fact is first taught and demonstrated visually, and then the player is tested for comprehension;
• The game is engineered to move learned facts from short term to long term memory: as play continues the facts learned earlier in the game are re-tested and mixed in with facts more recently learned;
• In the learning phase problems are set up visually with both numbers and a diagram, and there is also an audio component for learners who depend more on this type of input in their learning;
• Because the player has to stop and wait for things to occur, or to focus on navigating through the dungeon, there is time for facts to really sink in before they are tested again;
• Kids think of the primary purpose of the game as navigating through the maze, opening doors and defeating ogres - because of this, the learning of the multiplication facts happens almost in the background. Charlotte Mason found this was an extremely effective way for anybody to commit knowledge to memory.

Each level of the game deals with one set of multiplication facts. So all the problems in level 2 deal with the “2x” table. Once all the facts have been mastered there is an ogre that will test the player on all the facts for that table. Answers must be given before a timer runs out, so the facts must really have been committed to memory: there’s no time for your student to count or do the computation at this point. At the end of the test a scoreboard appears, where the player can see which facts he has mastered and which ones he needs to practice a bit more. If more practice is needed, he will be sent to work on the problems he needs to learn and then he will be re-tested. Once total mastery is achieved the level is complete.

At this point I would like to tell you that anyone can download the demo version of the game from the web site, free of charge. The demo is a fully-featured version that teaches all the facts for multiplication from 2-12, just the same as the pay version. But if you like the program as much as we did in our house, you’ll want to get the full version. It can be downloaded for $39.99 USD, or you can order a CD version (and get the download as well) for an extra $5.

The main advantage of the full version is that the scenarios change from one level to the next, whereas in the free basic version the player stays in the dungeon with the ogres. In the full version, the navigation aspect of play becomes more difficult. Because the player has learned many of the facts while working on the lower levels, this extra challenge is not overwhelming. Remember 2×9 is the same as 9×2, 3×9 is 9×3, 4×9 is 9×4, etc. So essentially when the higher levels are reached the player has fewer facts to master. I’m willing to bet the additional challenge of moving about in the game helps the player to “forget” they are working on problems that are more difficult, too! Some of the additional scenarios in the full game are a machine world and a lava world with fire breathing dragons.

Like most high-end games, Timez Attack offers the option of saving a game and coming back to it later. There are a number of helps and cheats, that allow a player to go directly to the final challenge for a level if he thinks he is ready for it. You can also go directly to the level corresponding to a particular multiplication table if you want, which makes the game perfect for remediation or review as well as initial teaching of multiplication.

The game is available for both Mac and PC, and you can also get a Spanish version which at the time of writing was discounted to $19.99 for the full game! For classroom teachers or schools there is a 30-day demo version of the full game, and pricing scaled to your particular uses of the game. The school version offers goodies such as the creation of reports so teachers can track the progress of a single student, a class, or even a whole school.

Timez Attack is an encouraging and fairly forgiving game. It is possible to get lost in the maze, or occasionally to end up positioned so the player can’t see the “boss” ogre doing the testing. But in general, the game in designed to help your child along. Most times the worst that will happen is a door won’t open yet, or the player may have to repeat a few challenges for practice. Although some of the figures in the game (e.g. dragons, ogres) look a little menacing they are actually set up to be helpful. I test played the 2x level. The ogres nod or shake their heads to indicate if the answer is correct. All but the “bosses” will give the correct response and return to a problem after another fact is tested. Ogres do carry big clubs that they wave at the little green guy who represents the player. But when they “strike” the player is just hit by some green goo and knocked over. The character gets right back up again, and keeps playing. When an ogre has exhausted his challenges he either dissolves into the floor, or retreats.

If I had to pick a weak area of this game I would say that its audio component could stand a slight improvement. The little voice that says the numbers when facts are taught isn’t as clear as I would like it to be, and I’d actually like to hear the voice say something more than just the numbers. If not “two times four” then perhaps something like “two groups of four.” I’m not sure why the developers didn’t do this, however it would be an easy thing to fix and I think it would be beneficial for aural learners. If you have a child like this, I suggest you have the child say the numbers and the facts aloud, as he plays the game. This will improve his retention of the facts and give him quicker success in the game.

Except for that one small issue, I’d say this is a perfect game. But do expect that your kids will not want to stop playing it! If you want to get other work done you’ll need to assign it before your kids sit down to work on their times tables
Get the free download of Times Attack and give it a test drive at your house. But if you enjoy this game, do encourage the developers by upgrading to the full version! I’m sure they’ve got a ton of ideas for similarly educational games….

This work was created by Ruby of Freehold 2, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.

Excerpts copyright quoted authors. Please visit their sites to read more, and respect the terms of their copyrights. Thanks!