Retell and Repeat...Practice Makes Perfect!

Happy Sunday friends! Lindsey here. I hope you all had a wonderful holiday and a great break!

Today, I wanted to share with you what we have been working on in class over the last couple weeks. We have been busy!! We started working on retelling the beginning, middle and end, as well as identifying the problem and solution, of a story. Now, when I say we started working on retell I don’t mean this is the first time that we have talked about BUT it is the first time we have really began to dig into it.

Over the years, I have found that retelling a story is difficult for so many of our kiddos. They just really struggle on including those important details. So each year we REALLY dig deep and practice.

READ. RETELL. REPEAT.

These are the great stories I chose this year for my anchor texts. These stories are super high interest and the kiddos LOVE them. They are also pretty simple to retell and have a great problem and solution. We do a lot of whole group retells. We use the anchor below to structure what we include in the beginning, middle and end.

The expectation for the kiddos is that by the end of second grade they are reading independently at a DRA level 28. To pass this level, they need to be able to write a retell. So it is important to include those signal words on my anchor. This also helps them to make sure the events that they are including are put into the right order.

I am a really big fan of not making a ton of copies. It is just so much easier to have the kiddos write in their reading response journals. Plus, they keep all their work together. I always put a large version of the graphic organizer on an anchor and the kiddos write their response in the same format. This picture shows one of the kiddos writing a retell for The Black Rabbit in there reading response journal following the same format we will use for our assessment.

This is the format for our assessment. Usually, we use passages for their texts but the anthologies work well too! We don’t use our reading curriculum because it is so out of date and not aligned, but the anthologies do have some good stories.

Our retell also carries over into guided reading as well. This is a great way for me to scaffold the retell into what every level needs. This particular group is working on retelling in order, which is why they are using the index cards.

There are so many more activities that we did, but these few give you an insight into what we are working on. This week, we are moving onto our gingerbread studies and we will be using our Gingerbread Passages set for continued retell practice. For a peek at that, click the picture.