6 Engaging Story Retell Activities

Do you ever feel like you read a story to your students…and then don’t know what else to do? I can help you by telling you about my six best story retell activities for PreK-1st grade. Focusing on retelling the story will extend your lessons, enhance details of the story itself, and deepen each student’s comprehension skills. So, let’s dive right in and discover some exciting ways to inspire creativity and imagination in your classroom!

Why Story Retelling Is Important

Retelling events in a story is an important part of reading comprehension skills and language structure. The act of retelling allows children to practice the concepts of beginning, middle, and end, as well as rehearsing necessary language skills through a joyful, structured classroom task.

After children have listened to a story several times, the story can be retold through a variety of props and activities. In my classroom, retelling our story of the week is a MUST-DO activity. I do not mean that I force children into doing something they are unwilling to participate in. I mean…they cannot WAIT to complete the retelling activities that take place. Children are excited to complete the tasks, which leads to extraordinary levels of student engagement!

How am I able to do this in my classroom? A couple of important points come to mind. First, the resources I use are developmentally appropriate. Many of the activities are open-ended, allowing students to work at their level of expertise. Second, the tasks are somewhat repetitive throughout the school year. The repetitive nature of these activities grants children the time needed to become independent workers. By the end of the school year, they are experts at retelling stories! This is important, as state learning standards require a story to be retold. We read many stories throughout the week, but we have one story of focus that we retell in many ways to build comprehension skills.

What Does Story Retelling Look Like?

Six of my favorite weekly retell activities include:

• restating the story with visual sequence cards
• creating a story retell crown
• creating a retell necklace
• acting out the parts while wearing retell crowns that dictate which part each student is playing
• Completing individual activity sheets that focus on beginning, middle, and end OR retells a story from start to finish
• Retelling through writing

In kindergarten and 1st grade, writing about the events of the story is highly popular! Students especially love to give their opinion of the story. While opinion writing is not at all the same as retelling a story, leave space for this motivation to write! Students can always be encouraged to write an opinion of an event that occurred in the story, which can lead to deeper writing knowledge about a story’s events.

Story Retelling Resources for Your Classroom

Whether you’re a seasoned educator or a new teacher, my story retell activities are sure to captivate your students and make learning an enjoyable adventure. Don’t let a story fade away after it is read one or two times. Help students build language skills and a solid sense of print concepts by retelling the story with them in multiple ways.

Each download includes color and black/white options for a variety of activities that include:

• Story sequence retell cards with book title labels and numeral & ordinal cards
• Story retell necklace activity
• Beginning, middle, and end sequencing activity
• Story sequence retell crown activity
• Opinion writing pages (gray lined & handwriting lined)
• Character crowns (for story reenactment)

Easy story packet includes various levels of retell and writing activities to choose from, and they align with the following TS Gold (TSG), kindergarten, and first-grade learning standards:

Literacy – TSG Lit.18.C; RL.K.2 & RL.K.3; RL.1.2 & RL.1.3

Writing – TSG Lit.19; W.K.1; W.1.1