Let’s look at two instructional strategies you can include every day in your prekindergarten program to prepare your students for kindergarten.

Retelling Stories

Retelling is a powerful strategy for increasing children’s vocabulary and their sense of story and familiarity with more challenging sentence structures. When students retell stories they demonstrate their growing understanding of story structure. They start with the beginning of the story and describe the setting, list story details in sequence, and interpret the sounds and expressions of characters’ voices. The ability to retell stories with well-formed narrative structures has a strong relation to later reading achievement. When retelling informational texts, children think about the main things they learned and try to explain them to others.

Here are some tips for encouraging your prekindergarten students to retell stories.

• Read the story to children several times. Be sure to discuss the story with students before and after reading to better prepare them for retelling.
  
• Provide props such as flannel boards, puppets, masks, or key items (such as bowls and spoons for Goldilocks and the Three Bears) to support the retelling.
  
• Show children how to retell the story with props.
  
• Invite a child or children to retell the story for others or for you.
  
• Make the book and story-retelling materials available to children during center time.

Try using the following prompts if children get stuck while retelling a story.

• If a child has trouble getting started, try “Once upon a time...” or “Once there was...”
  
• If a child pauses before getting to the end, try “What comes next?“ or “Then what happened?”
  
• If a child stops retelling the story and needs more specific help, try asking a question that will remind the child about what happened next, such as “Where did Jenny go?”

Some prompts will help children focus on the essential elements of story structure:

• “Who was the main character?”
  
• “Where did the story take place?” Or “Where were they?”
  
• “What kind of trouble was _______ having?”
  
• “What happened next?”
  
• “How did ________ solve the problem?” Or “How did the story end?”

Providing props and inviting children to retell stories with repetitive dialogue, such as " Not I, said the cat" provides additional support to English language learners and language-delayed students. Repetitive story lines are easier to remember and try out, while props help provide visual support for the meaning of the story. Acting out stories with small groups of children also supports the English language learner or language-delayed student.

Interactive Read-Aloud

You will want to revisit previous sections of this training to remind yourself of the key steps and features of powerful interactive reading (Unit 2, Language Section 1B). In the language section of this training we talked about interactive reading for promoting language development. In the motivation section of the emergent reading section, we talked about interactive reading (read-alouds) as a tool for motivating children to learn to read and building their understanding of print concepts.

You can increase children’s listening comprehension skills during interactive reading when you ask questions that encourage them to do the following:

• Make connections among the book, their own lives, and other books that have been read to them. For example, “Have you ever been on a picnic? Who went? What happened?” Or “How is this story like the book we read yesterday?”
  
• Make predictions about what will happen next in the book and why. For example, “What will happen next? Why do you think that?”
  
• Allow them to ask their own questions about the book. For example, “What are you wondering about as I read this part of the book to you?”
  
• Discuss characters' feelings and motivations. For example, “How is Cinderella feeling in this part of the story?” Or “Why did Goldilocks go in the bear’s house?”