Very often first-graders and their parents are faced with the same problem - the inability to retell the text quickly and efficiently. Sometimes adults do not have enough strength, patience or experience to teach their kids this skill. Turning a blind eye to the problems encountered in primary school, parents discover that their children in high school do not even know how to work with the text. And so that in the future there will be no problems with academic performance, adults should think in advance about how to teach them to retell the text of the child.
How useful retelling for the child
A retelling is a statement in your own words of a read text. But you should not reduce the development of this skill only to good study and to the fact that the entire school curriculum is designed for retelling. Parents should understand that the ability to retell will bring a lot of advantages to the child, and here are the main ones:
- The development of memory and the ability to convey other people's thoughts at ease. Moreover, the process can be creative, which in the future will lead to the development of the ability to comment and analyze various situations.
- The destruction of the primitive reflex chain "read - retell the text" and replace it with a more complex one - "receiving information - processing it - retelling."
- The increase in vocabulary, as well as the development of speech.
- The ability to associatively evaluate facts, situations and compare them with their possible actions.
- A brief retelling provides an opportunity to make a summary of the text, and also teaches the presentation of the main and most useful information.
Possible difficulties and problems
Often children have trouble retelling. Specialists identify several reasons: difficulties in understanding the text heard, as well as problems of speech development. If in the second case it is necessary to direct efforts towards the development of the speech apparatus not through retelling, then in the first case one should think exactly about how to teach to retell the text of the child.
Correct text selection for retelling
To overcome all difficulties as quickly as possible, you need to choose the right text.
The main selection criteria:
- the story should be short (children cannot concentrate on one activity for too long);
- the baby should have an interest in the plot (a boring description of nature is unlikely to be interesting for the child);
- in the selected text there should not be too many heroes, moreover, each of them should have some bright distinctive feature.
Text work
When working with a child on a retelling, you must read the text expressively. It is necessary to discuss everything with the baby, ask what he does not understand, and explain unfamiliar words. Let the child think why the text has such a name, and what he liked the most. In conclusion, the baby himself should try to retell the text.
At the very beginning of the training, you can add work with plot pictures. They will encourage the child to draw up a plan of presentation and help to retell the text sequentially.
Pictures are laid out in random order after reading the text. The child himself must determine the course of events and lay out cards with images in the correct order. Further, it will be much easier for the baby to retell what he heard, starting from the pictures.
Basic plan for preparing a child for retelling
To correctly teach the child retelling, you can recommend a few simple rules:
- After reading the text, you need to choose the most important thing.
- Next, you need to return to the beginning of the text and read a small part of it.
- Reading each part, one should ask the child questions about what was stated and what, in his opinion, was the most interesting.
- To begin with, let him answer with one sentence. For young children, this is not an easy task; parental assistance will be required.
- When answering, the child should not answer verbatim.
- Now we should move on to another equally important stage - the preparation of the plan. For each of the parts you need to come up with a small heading.
- You can work with the text in a playful way. You can try to retell every sentence you read in your own words.
- Following such an algorithm, it is not difficult to understand how to teach a child to retell a text. After all of the above, it remains to retell the text, following the previously drawn up plan.
- You need to be patient, and at the end of the work done, be sure to praise your baby.
How to teach retelling a young child
The techniques for teaching kids to retell are almost the same at any age. The difference lies in the implementation of each of them.
Not every parent knows how to teach a child to retell a text. Grade 1 often uses a technique such as “retelling on behalf of the protagonist.” Having outlined the story to elementary school students, you need to invite them to introduce themselves in the place of the protagonist and tell what happened to him. Older students can complicate the task: let them tell a story on behalf of several characters and evaluate their actions.
Parents who do not know how to teach a 5-year-old child to retell a text can use the retelling method. Little readers who like to play with dolls can do a scene where their favorite toys will be the main characters.
How to teach retelling a middle-aged child
Once in school, children must learn to subordinate all their actions to a specific order. And here the child comes to the aid of the ability to make plans. This, in combination, is an excellent technique that will tell you how to teach an eight-year-old child to retell texts, it is called "retelling according to plan." The older the student, the shorter the plan should be. Thus, the child will quickly learn to work with reference circuits and remember minor details.
It will be useful for middle-school students to work with reading diaries. There, students can make notes about books they read: designate storylines, spell out the names of all the main characters. Such a diary can become an indispensable teaching aid, and a brief retelling will be much easier. For young children, such a diary can be compiled orally, periodically returning them to the read text and asking suggestive questions.
The ability to retell is a necessary skill that favorably affects the development of memory, speech and thinking. It must be remembered that retelling is not a training in the memory of the child, but in understanding the information presented. When thinking about how to teach a child to retell a text, one does not need to demand mechanical memorization. If the baby understands everything, then telling the text in his own words will not be difficult for him.