Retelling with Jan Brett

We have really gotten back in the swing of things since winter break.  This week, the students have been learning how to retell a story.  I introduced the students to one of my most favorite children's authors Jan Brett.  They have fallen in love with her stories and beautiful illustrations.  We started with learning about Jan Brett.  I showed them photographs of Jan and told information about Jan's life.  They were immediately intrigued.  We then began by reading The Mitten.  This is a great story for retelling.  The story centers around Nicki who wanted snow-white mittens.  He soon loses one of the mittens and various animals climb inside the mitten to get out of the cold snowy weather.  Finally, when the bear sneezes, all the animals fly out of the mitten and Nicki finds his mitten against the blue sky.  We reviewed how to check for understanding while reading a book.  We talked about the importance of checking for understanding and how it helps us to retell the story at the end of the book.  [Home Tip:  While reading books at home, have your child stop after every couple of pages and answer who is the story about? and what is happening?]  At the end of the story I modeled how to retell a story in sequence.  The next day, we reread The Mitten.  This time, the children each had a mitten and all the animals from the story.  Afterwards, we retold the story using our mitten and animals.  The students loved this activity.  Hopefully they brought their mitten and animals home and modeled how to retell for you!  The next day, we took retelling a step farther and completed a story map of The Mitten.  Then, I read The Missing Mitten Mystery.  We used this story as a comparison to The Mitten.  The students loved this story written by Steven Kellogg and did a great job comparing and contrasting the two mitten stories.  On Friday it was another Jan Brett story, The Hat.  Next week, we will use this book to practice retelling with our partners.   The students will also be introduced to some more of Jan Brett's books.  

I hope you enjoy the pictures below of the happenings in our classroom.  I love all of the learning that is taking place in our classroom right now.  I hope you all enjoy the three day weekend.  Next week, I will show you what we have done in the classroom to learn about Martin Luther King, Jr.