Retell Boxes, Technology, and a FREEBIE!

Things have been a bit crazy between my master’s classes, holiday festivities, and trying to keep you with being a great mom and wife.  One of my final projects in my comprehension class was to take an activity from our text and use it within my thematic unit.  I chose to use retell boxes because that is one of our learning targets for the week.  It went over really well and we even got to add a little technology into the mix. 

       I introduced the lesson with the book Trouble With Money.  This fit perfect with our community theme for the week: Consumers, Producers, Needs and Wants.  The kids had to focus on the 4 key components of a good retell: who, where, what happened, how it ends.  We completed an oversized organizer on an anchor chart as a whole group and I had my students come up and complete the sketches to match our thoughts.  It went pretty good and we were ready to start adding it into our readers within our guided groups. 

After our whole group lesson my guided groups practiced this skill with their readers for the week.  My highest readers were ready to advance so we used the Book Creator App to make retell books using books from RAZ kids that were on their level.  My kids loved this!  The others that weren’t quite ready practiced with their organizers and will hopefully be ready to produce their retell book later this week. 

Our main focus was drawing the pictures as a guide for our verbal retell. 

Click the book below to view my first groups Book Creator Retell.

 

I am going to be doing 12 days of Christmas giveaway for the month of December and my first one is available below.  Just click the picture to take you to the Google doc.  This is a Christmas theme activity that focuses on these tricky buddy vowels.  Have kids read the word on the ornaments and decorate their trees.

Happy Teaching....Christmas break will be here before you know it!!