The retelling reading strategy is a vital skill that helps elementary students improve their comprehension, memory, and communication abilities. Learn how to teach retelling with these helpful teacher tips and resources. These essential tools will make teaching the retelling reading strategy much easier for you and more effective for your students.
How to Teach Retelling
While retelling is one of the first reading comprehension strategies students are taught, it still requires explicit instruction. Start by introducing the key elements of a story—characters, setting, problem, events, and solution. Model retelling with a mentor text, demonstrating how to summarize each part of the story in a clear and concise manner. During your minilesson and small group instruction, use anchor charts and graphic organizers to help students organize their thoughts and apply the strategy. Provide ample opportunities for practice through small groups, literacy centers, and independent, offering feedback and support to help students retell independently.
There are multiple story retelling examples:
- Beginning, Middle, End
- First, Then, Next, Last
- Five Finger Retell
- Story Maps
- Somebody-Wanted-But-So-Then
- Plot Mountain (upper elementary)
Why is Retelling Important?
Retelling is important because it helps elementary students understand and remember stories better. When kids retell a story, they practice organizing their thoughts and recalling details, which boosts their memory and comprehension skills. It also improves their speaking and listening abilities, as they learn to share information clearly and listen to others’ retellings. Plus, it’s a fun way for them to show what they’ve learned and enjoy stories even more!
Some of the benefits of story retell include:
- Improves Comprehension: By summarizing the story in their own words, students get a deeper understanding of the plot, characters, and setting.
- Enhances Memory: Retelling helps students remember the details and sequence of events, reinforcing their memory.
- Boosts Language Skills: It encourages the use of new vocabulary and complex sentences, improving their speaking and writing abilities.
- Develops Critical Thinking: Students learn to identify the main ideas and key details, which strengthens their analytical skills.
- Builds Confidence: Sharing a story boosts students’ confidence in their ability to communicate effectively.
- Encourages Engagement: Retelling makes reading more interactive and fun, fostering a love for stories and learning.
Story Retelling Tools
When teaching comprehension reading strategies, such as story retelling, there are some essential tools we always need. Teachers can use these story retelling tools during whole group minilessons and small group instruction to model how to implement the strategy. Students benefit from using the tools during literacy centers and independently reading as they practice applying the retelling reading strategy.
Retelling Mentor Texts
Retelling is a reading strategy that can be applied to any book but to be most effective we need to be strategic with the books we use. Choose books with clear and simple plots when introducing story retell. These are some of my favorite books for retelling.
Retelling Anchor Charts
Anchor Charts are an essential tool for introducing a new reading strategy. Displaying an anchor chart during your minilesson helps keep your instruction focused. It can also serve as a visual reminder of the reading strategy during small group instruction, literacy centers, and independent reading.
There are multiple retelling anchor charts you can use depending on your focus:
- Sequence (Beginning, Middle, End or First, Then, Next, Last)
- Story Elements
- Somebody-Wanted-But-So-Then
- Plot Mountain (upper elementary)
Five Finger Retell
The 5 Finger Retell is a popular visual to help primary students retell a story. Each finger represents a different part of the story: character, setting, problem, events, and ending.
Students can use this strategy to retell the story orally or in writing. When writing students create a 3 paragraph retelling. Students write about the character, setting, and problem in the 1st paragraph. The 2nd paragraph summarizes the events from the beginning and middle while the 3rd paragraph describes how the story ends. Scroll to the bottom of the post for the free chart!
Retelling Prompts
When planning your retelling reading strategy lesson plans, it is helpful to record specific prompts you want to use. These can be applied to any text during whole-group or small-group lessons to support students as they practice retelling a story.
- What happened in the beginning/middle/end?
- What happened before/after (event)?
- What are the key events in the story?
- How do the characters try to solve the problem?
- How does the story conclude?
Sentence Stems
Be sure to provide students with sentence stems to help them retell stories independently. Sentence frames are especially valuable to primary students and English Language Learners who may not yet have the language to fully express their thinking. It can be helpful to post them in a place where students can easily refer to them to guide their discussions and written responses.
- In the beginning… middle… end…
- First… Then… Next… Last…
- After that, the characters…
Retelling Graphic Organizer
Graphic organizers can help students organize their thoughts as they are retelling a story. There are multiple types of retelling graphic organizers students can use.
Save time by creating a Reading Graphic Organizers file box to keep at your small group table. That way you always have copies ready for students to practice the skill!
Teacher Cheat Sheet
It can be helpful to have a Comprehension Strategy Cards as a quick reference cheat sheet to refer to during reading small groups. It can remind you of the graphic organizers and prompts to use for each reading comprehension strategy.
Readers’ Notebook Page and Study Guide
A readers’ notebook page can remind students of the strategy, graphic organizer, and sentence stems to use when independently retelling a story.
Print a copy that they can use for additional practice at home.
Retelling Bookmark
Students can keep a Reading Bookmark in their book boxes to remind them how to retell as they read independently.
Tips for Teaching Story Retell
Some students may struggle with retelling. Here are some common challenges students may experience and how you can scaffold learning for those students.
- Difficulty Remembering Details: Some students may have a difficult time remembering all of the key details from the story or remaining focused. Start small by retelling a sentence, paragraph, or page before retelling the entire story. There are retelling reading strategies that can help break the text into smaller parts.
- Confusing Story Sequence: Some students may remember the details but struggle to retell events in the correct order. Students can look back in the text and number the events. Assist students with using sequencing words such as first, then, next, last. Graphic organizers can also help them organize their thoughts.
- Telling Too Many Details: Other students will want to retell ALL the details and struggle to identify the key events. The Who/What strategy will help them focus on the key events: Who was this page/story about? What happened? Prompt these students by asking “what was the most important part of the story?”
Retelling Activities
While these tools are all scaffolds for students as they learn how to retell a story, you may be looking for more specific activities to teach the skill. Be sure to check out the corresponding post with Retelling Activities that your students will love!
Save yourself time and money with this Comprehension Bundle! It includes ALL the tools you need for EVERY reading strategy!
You’ll find anchor charts, graphic organizers, and so much more!
You’ll find anchor charts, graphic organizers, and so much more!
What other tools have you found beneficial for retelling? Share in the comments!
Want to Learn More?
You’ll love these related posts!
WANT TO PIN THIS FOR LATER?
