If you have a perplexing pupil who sounds like a good reader but doesn’t seem to understand what is read, insights from retelling of a passage can be very helpful. Spend a short 10-15 minutes to demystify that student with a simple retelling strategy.
Retelling is a short, informative approach that can reveal how students recall, order, /or evaluate. It can produce remarkable illumination into the thinking skills of a baffling student.
You can determine
1. if students can discern the beginning, middle, and end of a selection.
2. if they can recognize who? what/ when? where? why? in a story
3. if they can determine the main idea and supporting details
4. if they can distinguish between important and unimportant details
5. if they can glean cause and effect
6. if they can retell in correct time sequence
7. if they can make inferences and evaluations
8. if they use standard speaking, language, and grammar skills
9. if they can organize their thoughts coherently
In my 30+ years as a reading specialist, this retelling strategy has provided me with remarkable insight into comprehension skills of struggling students. Sometimes it’s astounding how mixed-up and foggy their understanding is!
The text must be at least at an instructional level with few decoding errors to gain this valuable information.
If you would like to try my enlightening format for a retelling strategy, it can be found for FREE
Retelling Profiles for Fiction and Non-fiction
You might also be interested in another valuable comprehension strategy:
They both can be found in the
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