Retelling is a process of re-narrating the story by students to bring out personalized perceptions. It has multiple advantages like better vocabulary and communication skills when properly implemented. Apart from understanding the meaning, a few examples to refer can guide you better in opting for this strategy.
The instances we provided here not only give you a diverse set of retelling options but also inspire you to show their significance. Also, check out other insights like techniques and the importance of these practices.
Approaches of classroom retelling- Methods to make it effective!
The above lines clearly make out that classroom retelling is crucial. To ensure all of these factors, teachers can use the following five strategies to make them effective and engaging:
- On paper retelling: As the name depicts, this idea stipulates the learners to put their retelling thoughts on paper. This strategy has multiples edges like:
- Writing can ensure better organization of thoughts
- A new version of the story can be documented
- Creates a scope for the learning disabled to practice writing in the classroom
- Using Graphic organizers: To make retelling easy and visually appealing, students can use organizers like flowcharts, timelines, and tabulations to narrate easily. This way, all the elements like characters and settings are made sure.
- Roleplay: Students can narrate as they act out the characters of the story. Commonly known as roleplay, this strategy is often helpful in bringing out the creative abilities while they retell.
- Questionnaire: Teachers can make the process of retelling easy by asking questions about it. By this, the learners can recall a snippet from the story, thereby reducing efforts. This strategy can have the upper hand when instructors analyze multiple pupils at a time.
- Oral retelling: Giving the pupil a chance to give an orientation is a great idea to address their confidence levels and communications skills. Here, they may arrange events in sequence to ensure a smooth flow.
Story retelling examples- Learners exercising in the classroom
Keeping in view the above set of approaches, here are a few examples demonstrating how students can retell a story in the classroom. You can explore and choose one of these styles to employ with your little one.
EXAMPLE 1: Red hood session with stickers
The story considered is of the Red Riding Hood. Teachers can take references from the book to narrate the children to start with. The story is all about a small girl who goes around a village with a red scarf. People call her the Red Riding Hood. Once, she went to visit her grandmother. She met multiple animals like butterflies, frogs, and a wolf. Later when she reaches grandma’s home, she talks to the voice behind the door in thought it was her grandmother, but it was a hungry wolf instead.
To retell this story, the teacher offers the children a few stickers of the red hooded girl a piece of paper, and a pencil. Now, the little ones make 10 boxes. In the first two boxes, they write characters (girl) and setting (home and forest). In the later 7 boxes, they stick red riding hood stickers and draw scenes of what happened in her journey in a sequence. This practice ensures they sequence the scenes and also remember details of settings in every box.
EXAMPLE 2: A competition for cinderella
The story is all about the princess named Cinderella who lost her mother in her childhood. She is brought up by her stepmother with stepsisters with a bit of partiality. But everything changes with the arrival of a prince named Rian. With another backstory, Rian gets closer to Cinderella. The disputes in their relationships and kingdoms turn the rest of the story. The teacher and the students can use the narrative book to understand the story.
To retell this story, the teacher provides a piece of paper to each student. Then they start a timer of say 45 minutes. Learners start with writing five elements of the story: setting, plot, characters, conflict, and theme. Later in a few words, they write the story in their own words. They also need to complete the open-ended decision of the character. Later the instructor collects these papers, evaluates them, and gives feedback. The evaluation lets the youngsters focus and identify flaws, and rectify them.
EXAMPLE 3: Three goats on Straw
This example takes references from the story of The Three Billy goats. The story is all about three goals of different sizes who like eating grass. But there was no grass in their location as other goats overgrazed every blade. The only way these hungry animals can access grass is to move over to the other side of a bridge. But, a monster living there is a challenge for them, as it always waits for juicy goats to prey on. How these goats moved to the other side forms rest of the story.
To retell this story, students draw characters of the story on paper and cut them out. Now, they take straws or ice cream sticks to paste these cuttings on them, thereby creating puppets. Teachers call the students to the stage where they re-narrate the story. First, they start by giving out the characters and settings and then traverse through all the events one by one.
EXAMPLE 4: Yummy Pizzas with Element Roping
Here we refer to William Steig’s Pete’s A Pizza to retell. The tale is all about Pete, the son of a pizza maker. Pete turns bored, and his father turns him into a pizza. The recipe for making a pizza forms an interesting sequential part of the story. These steps include dodging, chopping vegetables, adorning the base, and baking.
Teacher can create an interesting base for children to recreate this story. To start, the teacher draws a rope with 6 or 7 knots on the board. On each knot, there is an element. Students need to answer each of these to climb up the rope accomplishing retelling.
At first knot, the child needs to list out the characters that are Pete and his father. At the second knot, settings are to be described. Here it is the Pizza shop This ends with the last knot, where pupils need to retell the ending of the story. By this practice, learners can ensure to remember all the elements which may be missed out otherwise.
EXAMPLE 5: Sequencing cards of innocent caterpillar
Here the story of retelling is The very Hungry Caterpillar. The story is all about a caterpillar who is born out of an egg with hunger. For the first six days, it eats wherever it gets insight- including fruits and junk food. This gets it a stomach ache. On the seventh day, it feeds on green and fresh leaves to feel better.
Teachers procure several cards with scenes of the caterpillar and the item it feeds on. They shuffle these cards and place them before the pupil. The youngster arranges them in order of the narration. Later, they pick one card and narrate what happens in that scene. Similarly, they pick other cards to complete the narration. Mentors can ensure that the student doesn’t miss out on any of the details with this practice.
EXAMPLE 6: Turning into Ducks
Mr. and Mrs. Mallard are fond of pets. They decide to hatch six ducklings. After they are brought up safely, they are sent to go back to their home. In this journey, these innocent ducks face multiple challenges like bad weather and also from predatory hawks. You can refer to the book Make way for Ducklings to grasp the story.
To retell this story, a group of students can come together to create an act to recreate the scene.
Six students take the roles of the six ducks, and two more become Mr. and Mrs. Mallard. They can go on stage and recreate a play of the story. Retelling in a group makes the practice easy. Also, it enhances teamwork.
EXAMPLE 7: Neverland with story maps
Gwen is stuck in Neverland, and Peter Pan is looking to save her. What constrains them is the Unhooked blurs making good and evil difficult to differentiate. They have limited time to escape as Gwen is fading out her memories. The multiple stages they face to escape the neverland form the rest of the story.
Retelling here starts with the instructor providing an empty flowchart with seven spaces in it. Students need to fill these spaces with appropriate scenes to complete them. The first space is for characters (Gwen and Peter Pan) and setting (Neverland and levels); the second space is for introduction, and so on. The last space for the children is to write what they have learned from the story.
Story retelling- Why is it important?
Retelling, in brief, is the process of re-narrating a story or a concept to either explain to the students or to analyze their perception. It differs from summarizing as it is not just about focusing on the central motto. The following reasons make retelling pivotal for every learning child:
- Retelling supports better comprehension of the story as it assists the student’s accommodations of re-aligning the information. Morrow outlined that retelling allows listeners to structure their responses based on their personal perceptions, thereby creating scope for recreation of the story or concept.
- The Pre and post discussions of the story get stronger with this practice. With stress on elements and settings, attention to detail is ensured.
- Sequencing the order of the story has never been easy without retelling. Children get a chance to traverse through the notion multiple times in divergent proportions, making them effortlessly remember the sequence of scenes.
- Retelling supports a better grip on the language. For learning disabilities who may need additional practice to master words and sounds, these practices, either in the form of written or spoken, creates scope for implicitly enhancing vocabulary and grammar.
- Listening to the teacher’s narration and insights, students can ensure better listening and participation in class. Evidently, stories are liked by little ones.
Winding up with insights..
Retelling is an engaging and important strategy to implement in the classroom. These not only enhance comprehension, personalization, and sequencing; but also assist in language and vocabulary comprehension.
When the central idea of Retelling is adorned with a few examples and importance, you may get better clarity of the concept. The instances provided offer a diverse set of ways in which students can retell a story. Check out these options and see if you can get inspired by any of them in your classroom.
An engineer, Maths expert, Online Tutor and animal rights activist. In more than 5+ years of my online teaching experience, I closely worked with many students struggling with dyscalculia and dyslexia. With the years passing, I learned that not much effort being put into the awareness of this learning disorder. Students with dyscalculia often misunderstood for having just a simple math fear. This is still an underresearched and understudied subject. I am also the founder of Smartynote -‘The notepad app for dyslexia’,