Story retell activities to practice and improve reading comprehension skills and strategies. Story retell cards for whole group and individual practice.
Has there ever been a time you’ve sat down to give a DRA and realized your students were unable to retell the story? Or perhaps your reading assessments are showing low scores in reading comprehension? Several students struggle with providing a detailed retelling of a story. Nevertheless, developing and instilling reading comprehension skills and strategies doesn’t have to be challenging. As teachers, we want our students to have all the tools necessary to be fluent readers and, of course, effectively comprehend the text.
Story Retell Activities
Through our Engaging Readers units, students are continuously practicing reading comprehension skills and actively engaging in story retell activities. By implementing our reading lesson plans, teachers are seeing improvements in reading comprehension. Through weekly practice, students become more confident in their ability to comprehend a text and understand story structure.
The Texas Education Agency says in a “more complete retell” students can:
- identify and retell events and facts in a sequence
- make inferences to fill in missing information
- identify and retell causes of actions or events and their effects
Whereas, in a “simple retell” students focus more on:
- identifying and retelling the beginning, middle, and end of a story in order
- describing the setting
- identifying the problem and solution
In other words, retelling should become more detailed as students become better readers. Our Engaging Readers units for 2nd grade include two levels of retelling cards so that you can support and differentiate as needed.
Click below for the story retell cards for A Fine, Fine School:
Students with strong retelling strategies not only think critically and increase their level of comprehension but also improve their language development. You can boost reading comprehension in your classroom with effective teacher instruction and student practice. The story retelling cards are a great resource to support your teaching.
Click here for the story retell cards for La Princesa and the Pea:
Check out this blog post with more reading comprehension lesson ideas for this read aloud:
After reading the text, teachers work with students during whole group to completely retell the story using the story retell cards. After that, it is recommended that students partner talk to retell the story to each other. Finally, students independently create their own retell strip.
Click here for the story retell cards for Knuffle Bunny:
Check out this blog post with more reading comprehension lesson ideas for this read aloud:
Start adding story retell activities with these great weekly reading lesson plans! Click below to find our Engaging Readers curriculum for kindergarten, first, and second grade.
