Retelling Stories

The Very Hungry Caterpillar...

Retelling stories is extremely important in improving children's reading comprehension skills, making inferences, understanding story structure, and increasing vocabulary. It also allows them to become more engaged in the reading process.  

When searching for creative ways to retell stories I found this amazing blog that had taken popular children stories and created clip art of important parts of the story. The two books I chose for our class to retell this week was The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See. 

To start this process of retelling I wrote retelling on the board. I asked my students, "what does retelling mean?" "Do you notice any words within retelling that you know?" They pulled out tell and then I pulled out the prefix re-. We talked about other words that had re- in it. For example re-do. Then we talked about what the word tell means. They did a fabulous job defining retelling once we broke the word apart! 

Before I read The Very Hungry Caterpillar, I asked students to pay close attention to details. I then read the book twice. Once I was done reading I called on students to come up to the front of the room and retell us the story using the clip art! They were a bit shy at first, but once I helped them out a bit they did a wonderful job! Everyone had a great time and it was fun to see them become little story tellers. Each of them added a little twist to the story!