Strategy of the Week

Strategy-

Read-and-Retell

This strategy is designed to help students synthesize and retell what they've read about a topic, with a little assistance if needed.

While you are planning to read a selection with your class, go through it and determine which keywords most contribute to helping students understand the story. Before beginning to read together as a class or in smaller groups, have students jot down the key words on their paper or a piece of scratch paper. If possible, have them locate and underline these key words in the story. Read the story, then have students put the reading where they can't see it and use their list of keywords to retell the story to a partner. 

For higher level students, or for a topic that you are reviewing, you may wish to have students choose their own keywords after reading the story through once. If this is the case, then have them re-read the story after they've chosen the key words, then retell it to a partner using their keywords.

After students have retold the story to a partner, I like to have them use the same keywords to summarize. 

In case you're a little iffy on exactly how this strategy works, check out my FREE Chinese New Year Read-and-Retell Activity. Just click below to download from my TpT store!