The Thanksgiving Story!

 

Happy Thanksgiving Kinder Friends,

We have finally reached our Thanksgiving break and we are all excited for fun, food, family and friends! As we approached the final hours of school before our break we had to squeeze in just a bit more of some Thanksgiving fun! This year we have worked hard on story retelling. And I always wanted to try the Thanksgiving Story Retelling Bracelets that I have seen for several years. So I thought we would start with a story retelling chart.

 

 

And since we had the chart posted and laminated this week I thought we might be able to use it to discuss a little capitalization, review the difference between a letter and a word and review and practice some sentence segmentation. All in all, the story retelling chart was worth the time spent making it and provided a lot of opportunities for not only story retelling but some much needed review.

 

 

Like I said, I have never made the bracelets before but I know this will be a tradition for me from now on. The bracelets we super easy for the children to put together and the room was silent as I read each part as each bead was placed on the pipe cleaner. This was the perfect ending to all of the Thanksgiving activities we have worked on. And the bracelets were the perfect visual to help the children retell all of the key events.

 

 

And if you want to see what we made for a Thanksgiving Snack just click on the picture above!

 



What Have We Been Up To?



Hey Friends,

 We have been having some kind of fun lately learning about Story Elements and Story Retelling with two of our all time favorite books and characters with The Three Little Pigs and The Three Bears. Starting with a familiar text and building from there has proven to be a success for my class this year. It did not take long before we were able to identify and describe the characters, setting and key events in these classic stories. And we had a good time sequencing story events together. I was also happy to see that we were quickly able to work on story retelling and sequencing in pairs and then independently. This is sure to be a hit as a new addition to our Daily 5 routine. I think we have a firm understanding of the three ways to read a book and story retelling might just be one of our favorites now!

It sure has been nice to see some independent behaviors emerge and to feel as though we all have had success in these lessons. And now we can move on to some less familiar texts and apply the same strategies. I think we are ready! If you are interested in my We Can Learn About Story Elements Packet just click on the Three Little Pigs and it will take you there. If you need a copy of 3 Ways to Read a Book just click on the image above and grab it.

 

 

This download is Common Core Aligned:

 

K.RL.1 With prompting and support, ask and answer questions about key details in a text.

K.RL.2 With prompting and support, retell familiar stories, including key details.

K.RL.3 With prompting and support, identify characters, settings, and major events in a story.

K.RIT.1 With prompting and support, ask and answer questions about key details in a text.

K.RIT.2 With prompting and support, identify the main topic and retell key details of a text.

 

And covers TEKS Objectives:

Reading/Comprehension of Literary Text/Theme and Genre. Students analyze, make inferences and draw conclusions about theme and genre in different cultural, historical, and contemporary contexts and provide evidence from the text to support their understanding. Students are expected to:

K.6 (A) identify elements of a story including setting, character, and key events;

(B) discuss the big idea (theme) of a well-known folktale or fable and connect it to personal experience;

(C) recognize sensory details; and

(D) recognize recurring phrases and characters in traditional fairy tales, lullabies, and folktales from various cultures.

(8) Reading/Comprehension of Literary Text/Fiction. Students understand, make inferences and draw conclusions about the structure and elements of fiction and provide evidence from text to support their understanding. Students are expected to:

(A) retell a main event from a story read aloud; and

(B) describe characters in a story and the reasons for their actions.