Teaching · Reading Intervention

What a student recalls on their own, and what only comes back with a prompt.

After the student reads or hears a text, ask them to tell it back. Mark each element told without help, after a prompt, or not at all, and write the retelling down. The summary counts what was there and names the first thing to teach, with a routine for it.

Start a retellingWhat you get
$12one-time · every device you sign in on
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Included with Caveat Classroom and Whole-school licenses. Or get it in the Reading Intervention toolkit, $49 for 34 items.

The retelling organizer

Choose story or informational; the elements change to match. Use initials or a code, never a name. The example is made up.

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What you get

Teaching · Reading InterventionAlso for Teaching · Speech & Language$12 · included with Classroom and Whole-school licenses

What you finish with
For each retelling, the elements told unprompted, after a prompt and not told, three language-quality ratings, the prompts given and the retelling itself, with a summary that names the first element to teach and a routine for it.
Who it is for
Reading interventionists, speech-language pathologists and teachers checking comprehension and narrative language in grades K to 8.
Format
Browser organizer with story and informational modes. Several saved records; printed with the summary or as a blank paper form; CSV with one row per retelling; export and import a file.
Access
$12 one-time, yours on every device you sign in on; the tool opens once you are signed in with it. Included with Caveat Classroom and Whole-school licenses. Also in the Reading Intervention toolkit ($49) and the Teaching Suite pass ($199), and 1 more bundle. Everything you type stays in this browser; nothing is sent to Caveat.
Where it lives
The Reading Intervention space in Caveat Teaching; also listed in the Speech & Language space (story retelling for narrative language goals).
Support
Questions about an order, access or a correction: team@caveatacademic.com.
problem
Drawn for this page. Many retellings climb to the problem and stop; the way down, how it was solved, is often the first thing to teach.

How to use it

  1. Start a record with the student’s initials or a code; enter the text and how the student met it.
  2. Put the text away, unless you mean to let them look back, and ask for the retelling with an open prompt.
  3. Write the retelling down as it comes, with your prompts in brackets.
  4. Mark each element: told unprompted, after a prompt or not told. Prompts that name an element count as prompts for it.
  5. Rate the language rows and read the summary’s teaching routine for the next session.

Start a retelling

What the organizer is for

Why retelling

A retelling shows what a student understood and kept, in their own words, without the hints a question gives away. Comparing unprompted with prompted recall separates what they understood but did not organize from what they did not take in.

Read or heard

Retelling a text the student read mixes word reading with comprehension. Retelling one they listened to takes word reading out. When a student retells a heard story well and a read one poorly, the words are the trouble; when both are thin, look at language comprehension too.

Two titles, one organizer

The catalog listed an oral retelling evaluation organizer for reading intervention and a story retelling rubric for speech-language work. They are the same task, so one page does both, with an informational mode as well. Records use a code, never a name, and stay in this browser.

Sources

  1. Stein, N. L., and Glenn, C. G. (1979). An analysis of story comprehension in elementary school children. In R. O. Freedle (Ed.), New Directions in Discourse Processing (pp. 53–120). Norwood, NJ: Ablex (story grammar).
  2. Morrow, L. M. (1985). Retelling stories: A strategy for improving young children’s comprehension, concept of story structure, and oral language complexity. The Elementary School Journal, 85(5), 647–661.
  3. Shanahan, T., et al. (2010). Improving Reading Comprehension in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade (NCEE 2010-4038). Institute of Education Sciences, What Works Clearinghouse (teaching text structure).
  4. American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. Practice Portal: Spoken Language Disorders, on narrative language (asha.org/practice-portal).
  5. Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, 34 CFR Part 99.

The example student is made up. The organizer records one retelling of one text; it gives no standard score and does not diagnose a disability. Support: team@caveatacademic.com.