Revisiting Retelling!

Retelling-reading or hearing a text and telling it back in one's own words-is an important strategy for promoting children's comprehension. To do a detailed retelling, children need to understand the story's sequence, important vocabulary,characters,and key events, and be able to wrap up their retelling with an ending that makes sense. This can be challenging for some children. Repeated readings of the text can help.

In circle today we read the Three Billy Goats Gruff again, but this book had a different author and illustrator. We spent a few minutes looking at the covers of the two books and noticed some similarities and differences (one book is bigger than the other, one illustrator drew the goats with bells,the goats in one book are standing side by side etc...). The children were very observant and gave many details of their observations.

Yesterday we first introduced the story of The Three Billy Goats Gruff, and the storing flannel board pieces. Today we put out some clay with a few puppets (three goats the troll and a bridge), thinking they might want to create a clay sculpture of one or more of the puppets. For the most part all they wanted to do was retell the story with the puppets. At first they needed a little coaching and then they were "off and running!" Some of them new the story better than others. But those children helped their friends with important vocabulary and the story's sequence. Everyone had so much fun retelling the story together!

During the course of the week we will continue to revisit the story by using the flannel board, puppets,books and we will begin acting out the story tomorrow in our morning circle, and everyone will have a part! We can't wait!