Retelling the Story Activities Have Gone Digital!

Have you ever been in the middle of reading something and realized you had no idea what it was about? Good reading comprehension requires the ability to reword and store ideas in our memory as we read. We help children to learn this skill by having them retell stories. Story retelling helps early readers by

• Developing Sequence Skills
• Increasing comprehension and understanding of text
• Developing memory skills
• Improves engagement in the classroom

This interactive story retelling activity is a great way to get students to develop their reading comprehension skills. Students will read a short passage on each slide, then retell the story using click-and-drag picture interactions. This activity can be used with kindergarten and first-grade students.

Through this activity, students will increase overall reading comprehension and sequencing skills.

Tips for Differentiation + Scaffolding 

A team of dedicated, experienced educators created this resource to support your reading comprehension lessons.

In addition to individual student work time, use this activity to enhance learning through guided reading groups, whole class lessons, or remote learning assignments. 

If you have a mixture of above and below-level learners and ELL/ESL students, we have a few suggestions for keeping students on track with these concepts: 

🆘 Support Struggling Students

• Invite students to use a visual of story elements such as an anchor chart or classroom poster.

➕ Challenge Fast Finishers

• Encourage students to further their learning by explaining their reasoning of the order they sorted the images on each slide.

🧑‍🏫 Group Learning

Project the slides onto a screen and work through them as a class by having students orally retell the story while you manipulate the objects on the screen.

Plan lessons for all ability levels with our 10 Best Scaffolding Strategies! 

Easily Prepare This Resource for Your Students

Use the Download button to download the Google Slides Presentation.

Assign this interactive activity to Google Classroom. Please be sure to open in Edit mode, not presentation mode. Students read the decodable text and click/drag/drop to retell the story.

Alternatively, print slides to use for your: 

• Reading center
• Lesson warm-ups
• End-of-day wrap-ups
• Fast finisher activities 
• Homework assignments

This resource was created by Lindsey Phillips, a teacher in Michigan and a Teach Starter collaborator.

While you’re here, check out more activities and teaching resources that fill your lesson plans and students’ brains:

teaching resource Readers' Theater - Itsy Bitsy Spider Read and Retell Activity Engage young readers in texts with a dramatic reading of “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” and accompanying story retelling activity. teaching resource Positional Words Interactive Clip Cards Practice using position words (prepositions) with this Google Slides interactive clip card activity.