A Variety of Retelling Activities

Younger children need experience retelling familiar stories (e.g., The Three Little Pigs) or stories with predictable patterns (e.g., Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?) (Morrow, 1989). Older children can begin with stories and texts that have more complex plots and settings. Retelling can be done individually or in small groups, but tutors should always model the activity first. The following examples present a range of retelling activities.

Five-finger retelling—prompts for stories. A simple five-finger technique can help guide children through retellings. Each finger represents one of the following questions:

• Who were the characters in the story?
• What happened in the story?
• Where did the story take place?
• When did the story take place?
• Why did the action happen the way it did?

Oral retellings using props. Visual prompts help children organize their thoughts when retelling a story. Props such as finger puppets and felt boards provide a concrete structure to frame the story (Owocki, 1999). Make simple puppets by photocopying or drawing the main characters from a story and gluing them to craft sticks. You can also use these with a felt board—a small board covered in felt—using adhesive or Velcro.

Chalk talk. Morrow (1989) describes chalk talks as retellings in which children draw aspects of a story while telling about it. This technique is great for older children, and works with both fiction and nonfiction texts. Chalk talks are most effective when children have enough room to see how their retelling is evolving as they draw. Using chalk (on a chalkboard or the sidewalk) allows children to erase and redo elements of the retelling as needed. You can also use mural or chart paper with markers.

Dramatizations. Young children love dramatic play, and this vehicle provides them with a natural way to recreate a story. Choose read-aloud texts with simple story structure and a limited number of characters. Do this activity with a small group of children, each taking on a different character from the story. Older children, who might be reading more complex stories, can choose a particular part of the story to act out, such as the emotions of a particular character or what a character might have been thinking and why.

Story web retellings. Story webs help children organize their ideas about fictional texts. A story web is a visual way for the child to represent the key elements of the story, such as characters, settings, problem, and solution.

Flow chart retellings. A flow chart is a good way for a child to organize sequential information. Older children can use this technique for fiction and nonfiction texts with clearly sequenced events. The student begins by drawing the first box and writing the first event inside. He then connects the next box with a line and writes the second key event inside, continuing to add boxes until the retelling is complete. Adding boxes one at a time helps the child consider what information is important enough to add and the order in which events occurred.

Interactive picture books. Young children reading fairly simple stories can create picture books using the settings from the story. The process of drawing the settings lends itself to discussion of story structure and story sequence.

To make an interactive book:

• Review the story with the child
• Identify the most important settings²
• Illustrate the settings in the order they appear in the story
• Make a cover for the book and bind the pages together
• Make a set of characters from the story. (Draw or make photocopies and glue the images onto cardboard or sturdy paper.)

As the child retells the story using the book of settings, he can move the characters from page to page as the story progresses. (Tip for not losing the character pieces: Punch a small hole near the top of each character and thread a string through the hole. Punch a small hole in the top left corner of the closed book, pull each character’s string through, and tie. The string should be long enough that the child can move the characters with ease.)

Assessing Reading Comprehension Through Story Retelling