Retelling is a strategy used to determine how well a student has comprehended a specific story or content. Retelling involves having students orally reconstruct a story that they have read. Retelling requires students to activate their knowledge of how stories work and apply it to the new reading. As part of retelling, students engage in ordering and summarizing information and in making inferences.
Sketching, as a retelling strategy, has multiple benefits especially for students who struggle reading comprehension.
Sketching is an activity that can be done during whole group or small group instruction. While reading a story, the teacher would stop at different times and ask questions to check for understanding. Depending on how long the story is, the teacher would pause three times for beginning, middle, and ending of a story, or multiple times after each paragraph that contains an important idea or event. During each pause, students answer questions about the part that was read, then make a quick sketch to illustrates the passage. Colors are not important, as you can see in the picture, and it is not recommended that the teacher pauses for more than 3-5 minutes each time. Students should not be given time to construct intricate designs and artistic drawings, but rather to quickly produce a sketch that would help them remember the content. Scketching is intended to be used as a quick strategy that breaks down a larger text into smaller parts to help students retain the sequence of events, ideas, and other important details and related parts.
WHY IT WORKS
This strategy is perfect for stories and content for which teachers do not have pictures to go with. It helps students visualize the events, and it keeps them engaged during reading. Students love sketching and they don’t care as much as adults do if their drawings look perfect or not.
Students can use their sketches to talk about the sequence of events, beginning-middle-end, characters, setting, retell the story, summarize, and more. Their sketches can be displayed in a learning center or kept in students’ desks/binders for the duration of the book/text study.
Short text can be added to the sketches to help students retain the main idea of each passage or part. Text is also helpful for quick references throughout the book/text study.
After reading the story, as the teacher guides the discussion, students can refer to their sketches and recall important parts of the text, main idea, as well as offer interpretations of and responses to the text.