Look at that moon, telling back the sunlight like a boss.
If Principle 13 establishes the form of a student's education – the "wide and varied feast" paradigm – then Principle 14 indicates what the student is supposed to do with that feast. If Principle 13 is the syllabus, in other words, then Principle 14 is the lesson plan.
What does Principle 14 say?
As knowledge is not assimilated until it is reproduced, children should 'tell back' after a single reading or hearing: or should write on some part of what they have read. (source)
In other words, Principle 14 asserts that what children should do with the books that comprise their syllabus is narrate them.
Narration, as Charlotte Mason has said, is the "act of knowing." Retelling something to yourself, in your own words, is what locks that thing into your mind. We know things by rendering them into language, finding words for them – that's how we make sense of all our sensations, all the time. If we're going to add a new thought to our existing store of thoughts, we do so by finding words for that thought, and saying them to ourselves.
That is what narration is. It is the child's ownership of the ideas to which his reading introduces him.
And, basically, that is the lesson plan. What do you do in a Charlotte Mason education? You read and narrate.
Remember, again, that all these 20 Principles work together. You never have one idea in isolation from the others, and you can't cherry-pick one or two to focus on without considering the whole picture.
For example, we learned in Principle 10 that learning is the child's work, not ours. Remember that t-shirt of my son's that I keep talking about, the one that says, I Can Explain It To You, But I Can't Understand It For You? Well, that's basically our motto here, right? We do our children exactly zero favors in life by doing their understanding for them (Actually, explaining things to them is often of limited utility as well . . . ).
Furthermore, we were prepared to receive this principle, of learning as the child's work, by Principle 9, which establishes that the mind is a living and active organism. And all of this ultimately points back to Principle 1, "children are born persons."
By the time we arrive at Principle 14, then, and learn that what the child's work consists of is to narrate back what he's read, we are receiving that Principle in the context of an entire framework of ideas relating to the child's personhood and his capacity as a person for thinking and understanding. We should feel confident, by now, in our child's competence in these things. We should derive a measure of peace from the knowledge that it's not our responsibility to know things for our child. We should be fairly clear in our own minds regarding our responsibilities as educators, what those responsibilities are and are not.
Of course, in real life, we don't always feel the way we "should" feel, or derive the peace we "should" derive, or rest in the clarity in which we "should" be resting. It's human nature, and especially the nature of mothers, to feel anxious and as if we're not doing enough. But if I may be blunt: those anxieties are desolations. Don't listen to them. One of the great gifts of these 20 Principles is that they constitute a set of consolations. These are true and reasonable ideas. You can think through them and then hang onto them. They will reassure you that your child, as a person, is made to learn, and that learning, while hard work, isn't actually all that complicated and doesn't require a lot of resources outside the child himself. AND they will remind you what your child needs to do in order to learn.
Again, what he needs to do is read widely, in living books, and narrate them.
But let's revisit what Charlotte Mason herself says about narration, in Volume 1: Home Education:
Narrating is an art, like poetry-making or painting, because it is there, in every child's mind, waiting to be discovered, and is not the result of any process of disciplinary education. A creative fiat calls it forth. 'Let him narrate'; and the child narrates, fluently, copiously, in ordered sequence, with fit and graphic details, with a just choice of words, without verbosity or tautology, so soon as he can speak with ease. This amazing gift with which normal children are born is allowed to lie fallow in their education. Bobbie will come home with a heroic narrative of a fight he has seen between 'Duke' and a dog in the street. It is wonderful! He has seen everything, and he tells everything with splendid vigour in the true epic vein; but so ingrained is our contempt for children that we see nothing in this but Bobbie's foolish childish way! Whereas here, if we have eyes to see and grace to build, is the ground-plan of his education.
So, first of all, narration is natural. It's what we do. As adults, too, we do it all the time – we tell about what we've read, or seen, or done. And I wonder if, when we come to consider education, we despise this natural impulse because of its very simplicity and naturalness. We think it can't possibly be effective, because it's not complicated, and we do it so easily all the time. Where's the rigor in that?
The rigor comes in applying this natural impulse to more and more complicated experiences, presented in books. It's easy to remember everything you did. It's another leap to engage yourself with a book in the same way that you engaged yourself in imaginative play, and to identify enough with what happens in the book to be able to reproduce it as, in an imaginative sense, your own experience. That really is a complex cognitive and moral endeavor: to identify, engage, and care. The process from outside looks simple, but in the child's mind, it's really not – and it is an exercise in virtue as well as in intellect (not that you can really ever separate those things). It's an exercise in virtue precisely because the child is called on to care about and identify with something outside himself, in order to tell about it.
ALSO: Note, again, that narration "is not the result of any process of disciplinary education." You don't have to teach children how to narrate. You don't have to teach them how to learn.
What you do do is support them in developing this natural ability. You give them opportunities to do it. You validate that it is an ability and a skill. Anybody can narrate, in the same way that anybody can run. But just as to run well – to finish a 5K or a marathon – involves daily practice and challenging of one's own limits, so does narrating well also involve those things. Your job as educator is, in essence, very much like the job of the running coach: first to set the course that is to be run, then to help the student to improve, day by day, in running it.
Additionally, in this same passage Charlotte Mason details how a narration lesson should happen. She suggests that the child be at least six years old before being asked to narrate at all in a formal way, and recommends the books which he might begin narrating. The lesson proceeds in this way:
In every case the reading should be consecutive from a well-chosen book. Before the reading for the day begins, the teacher should talk a little (and get the children to talk) about the last lesson, with a few words about what is to be read, in order that the children may be animated by expectation; but she should beware of explanation and, especially, of forestalling the narrative. Then, she may read two or three pages, enough to include an episode; after that, let her call upon the children to narrate,––in turns, if there be several of them. They not only narrate with spirit and accuracy, but succeed in catching the style of their author. It is not wise to tease them with corrections; they may begin with an endless chain of 'ands,' but they soon leave this off, and their narrations become good enough in style and composition to be put in a 'print book'!
This sort of narration lesson should not occupy more than a quarter of an hour.
The book should always be deeply interesting, and when the narration is over, there should be a little talk in which moral points are brought out, pictures shown to illustrate the lesson, or diagrams drawn on the blackboard. As soon as children are able to read with ease and fluency, they read their own lesson, either aloud or silently, with a view to narration; but where it is necessary to make omissions, as in the Old Testament narratives and Plutarch's Lives, for example, it is better that the teacher should always read the lesson which is to be narrated.
For a more detailed consideration of the art of narration, what it looks like from first grade through high school, and how it feeds into the development of the student as a writer, I recommend Karen Glass's book Know and Tell. If you can read only one book about Charlotte Mason education and how to implement it, read that.
In summary:
You have spread the "wide and varied feast" of books before your child. How does he digest this feast? Through narration.