Four Ways to Retell

This is Chrissy from Buzzing with Ms. B! It's the eighth again, so that means it's my day to contribute to this fabulous collaborative blog!

I've chosen to make my post about something that's essential for student success in reading. Retelling!

Retelling is such an important skill for students. It's the foundation for almost all other comprehension strategies that come later - summarizing, making inferences, predicting, and so on. To help kids retell, we can do a few things that make it engaging and memorable.

#1 Props

Sometimes, students try to retell a story but they suddenly hit a memory wall. They can't remember what comes next. Who does the character meet? Where do they go? By having objects from the story - this could be a felt board with appropriate pieces, puppets, or actual objects - they can often remember the next event. They are prompted without anyone having to tell them anything!

#2 Pictures

A fun way we retell is having kids take pictures (copies of pages from the book) and sequence them in order. The students can point to each picture and tell a sentence about that event. This is also a great opportunity to have them use sequencing transition words like first, next, finally.

#3 Retelling Glove

I love using our retelling gloves with primary students. Students put the gloves on and point to each finger to retell that important part of the story. The parts of the story we include are the character, setting, what the character wants, the problem, a solution, and a lesson that can be learned.

#4 Drawing & Writing

This is the eventual step for students when they retell. We have scaffolded enough to this point to prepare them for retelling in writing and drawing. One fun way to get kids writing and drawing to retell is a sentence strip accordion. Take a sentence strip and fold it up into equal parts. On each part, students write and draw about the important events in the story.

How do you have students retell?