Reading comprehension can be a difficult skill for students to master. Learning how to retell stories can be a great way to help students increase their reading comprehension. In addition, this can be great to practice other important reading skills. So, how do you teach students how to retell stories in a way that makes sense?
What is a Story Retell?
When you ask students to retell stories, what you’re really asking them to do is summarize (which is a fundamental skill). However, this word can be a bit scary and foreign especially to younger students. Therefore, telling students to tell you what they read can be a great first step to summarizing.
How to Teach Students to Retell Stories
Every story has three main parts: a beginning, a middle, and an end. When you break down the three main parts of the story and ask your students to identify specific components of each, your students will be retelling stories with ease! In addition, they will be getting academic language they will use throughout elementary, middle, and high school.
Retelling the Beginning
To start, students need to know the basics of the stories. In order for us to understand a story, we have to know who is in the story and where it takes place. Who is in the story should include the main character, the person causing problems for the main character, and anyone who is important to the story. In addition, you need to know the setting which is where and when the story takes place. This can help set students up for success in terms of what kind of story this is going to be.
Finding the Conflict in the Middle
After students can identify who or what the story is about and where it takes place, they need to determine the conflict. The conflict in the problem in the text. It can be very obvious; however, it can also be something a little more subtle. Whether it is obvious or not usually depends on whether it’s an internal or external conflict. In most picture books that you read with students, the conflict will be easy to identify and rell. When your student retells a story, they might include some of the things that added to conflict in the middle as well as when everything came crashing together.
Where Does it END Up?
Before you can stop telling the story, you have to tell people how it ended. Sometimes it ends with something happy. Other times, it can end with an important moral or lesson. It’s important to focus on those morals and lessons when you are talking about the end of the story. Otherwise, you just state where all the characters end up in the text.
Using Pictures to Retell Stories
Of course we want students to get better at writing, that’s why we have journals they work on! However, this is not going to happen right away. When I start with students, we start with drawing pictures on the whiteboard as a class. After we have done a few together on the board, you can have students draw in their journals. You can also have them work in pairs or in groups on a story they are already familiar with. No matter what you do, having students retell stories is a great way to get students closer to summarizing.
Retelling a story can be a skill that takes a little bit of time. That’s why I like to use my Picture Book Pal activities to help students with some of the basic skills that come before this step like sequencing. Using pictures to sequence and then telling about each part of the story can help build a student’s confidence when it comes to retelling a stories. In addition, it helps them practice their comprehension skills.
