A major thing about the kids reading the living books (or hearing them read aloud to them, books on a higher level than they can read when little), is that they are ‘allowed’ to take away from the books what they will not told by the HS parent what they should have gleaned from the book.

Also CM uses narration as the way to summarize info and help polish communication skills (oral narration first, written at about grade 4). Whatever they say is okay, not looking for certain tidbits to be parroted back.

A contrast with classical and Well Trained Mind is that they are more into fact memorization in elementary years and care for rote memorization not emotional connection. In TWTM they say to read X book and child should narrate back facts X, Y, Z then work on memorizing names, dates etc in history.

CM hated parroting back of facts and wanted each child to take away different things from a book based on their unique nature. For example when reading about something in history maybe one child retains all about the fashion of the day and the other’s memory was all about the weapons of war from that time period. It is “all good”.