Learning Story Elements for Retelling

The children spent last week orally retelling Kevin Henkes stories. This week they have been identifying the story parts. They have used a triangle to identify the beginning of a story that includes three parts (one for each point) - the characters, the setting and the problem. The middle of the retelling includes the events of the story and the ending includes the solution - how the problem was solved. To practice identifying the story parts, the students used the shapes as a graphic organizer to identify the parts of Kevin Henkes' stories. Today the children worked in pairs. Each pair selected one of the stories that we have been using and used a large sheet of white construction paper, first drawing a triangle to represent the beginning, a long rectangle to represent the middle and a circle to represent the ending of the story. Next they put sentences or phrases from the story to represent each story element. This will be the outline that they will use to write their written retellings.