Engage primary students with exciting retelling projects
Students are often asked to retell stories. In fact, from Kindergarten to Grade 3, the Common Core Standards explicitly ask students to be able to “retell [recount] stories." While this may not be the most engaging student task, it is one of the most straightforward ways to assess reading comprehension.
While you can easily find activities online that you can print and have students put familiar stories in sequence, this doesn't help students develop a passion for reading literature or gaining knowledge. Take a hint from the maker movement and excite students in retelling by asking them to create and customize.
Use these ideas to inspire activities in your classroom that engage students in the process of retelling.
Create Comics
Unlike traditional worksheets, crafting comics offers a fun approach that leverages the visual aspect of storytelling, facilitating a deeper understanding of concepts through visual representation.
Because of the limited space for text in a panel, students must summarize, helping them learn to analyze the story's content and evaluate which information is important to share. This pedagogical technique, supported by research (Marzano et al., 2001), empowers students to develop critical thinking skills essential to the 21st century.
Assign the 4-box graphic organizer to focus retelling on beginning, middle, and end, or browse the Comic folder in the Design Templates library at your Wixie home page for a different structure that organizes their work.
Design-Print-Build
Combine reading, writing, and making by creating a comprehension cube. Students simply summarize key ideas and details within the confines of each face on the cube. Then, print on cardstock, cut, fold, glue and share them!
Use the blocks as a captivating display in your classroom or library to entice other students to delve into the story.
Take Advantage of Graphic Organizers
Using graphic organizers for retelling can bolster comprehension, foster analytical thinking and make reading a more engaging and enriching experience for students. For example, have students use a plot diagram to retell the events in a story.
Students can even construct interactive plot diagrams to visualize the story's structure by hyperlinking elements like the exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution to other pages of the project to create a nonlinear display of the story.
Empower students to take control of the retelling process. Share the organizer choice board link with your students, allowing them to effortlessly choose the organizer that best suits their needs for conveying key story elements.
Encouraging students to infuse their own creativity into retelling not only motivates and engages them but also fosters a deeper, more personal connection to the classroom content they are learning.
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