Starting to Work on Retells

My class is starting to move towards retells of the texts we are reading. That means we are using some of the great strategies I have learned about from reading The Power of Retelling. Here is a look at our most recent Books of the Week.

Every Monday we do predictions and vocabulary. Two weeks ago I had my students predict independently and post it on chart paper. I have found that the more we talk about predictions and justify the reasons we used to make the predictions the better my students are getting at this skill. 

Last week, we very quickly made predictions because I felt that the title "Larf" didn't really lend itself to making predictions and other than predicting that the book was about bigfoot/a sasquatch based on the cover there wasn't much else to go on!

Which was fine because I was really excited to get to our story mapping chart. 

We then moved on to finishing some sentence stems for our interpretations of of the book...and I discovered that my students really need some work in this area!! 

Here are some of the good ones...

Yesterday we completed a sequence GO! chart for our retell. My class seems to be on the ball so far with retells, but of course we were all together on the carpet. Time will tell.