Sarah Burleson

READ 366
Sara Horst
November 1 2016
Retelling Assessment and Write-Up
Background
Rachel* is a five-year-old, white, female kindergartener at Elkton Elementary school. She
previously attended preschool so this is not her first year of formal classroom instruction. Rachel
is a very active student in class in that she participates by answering questions asked by the
teachers and completes assigned work with little or no teacher assistance. She is in the highestleveled reading small group that works directly with myself and my CT every day during group
time. Based upon the results from literacy assessments, such as the PALs testing and the
Phonemic Awareness Skills Assessment, Rachel is an emergent reader. She often talks about
how much she likes reading and likes to read books; she was very willing and excited to
complete this retelling activity.
Story Retelling
This retelling assessment was completed on Tuesday October 18 th at 11:00 am. Usually
this time is used for reading small groups but my CT was dealing with a classroom management
issue, so she had the other students in this small group work with the assistant teacher on math
skills while Rachel completed this assignment with me. We together sat on the classroom rug
that is used for whole group time because Rachel choose the spot to be the most comfortable for
completing this assignment. To begin this assessment, I told Rachel exactly what was going to
happen: I was going to read her a story called The Three Billy Goats Gruff and then I wanted her
to tell the same story back to me using the character puppets I had set in front of her. She agreed
and I began reading the story to her. As I was reading the story, Rachel did not interrupt to ask
questions or make comments, but did interact with the character puppets by picking up the pieces
as they came up in the story. After I finished reading the story to her, she placed all of the
character puppets back onto the floor in front of her and waited for my instruction to begin
retelling the story.
To prompt Rachel to begin retelling, I asked her if she could now tell me the whole story
about the Billy goats starting at the beginning and going all the way to the very end. She began
retelling the story by picking up the puppets for the three Billy goats and naming them each
correctly according to size as she picked up the puppet. She did not call them by the name
"Billy" but instead called them Little, Middle, and Big Goat, and I did not take off points on her
assessment for this change. Rachel correctly retold and described the Setting and Characters of

the story, the Story Problem, and all three episodes. She did especially well at describing the
episodes that involved the interactions between the goats and the troll by saying almost the exact
phrases that were spoken by the goats to convince the troll to not eat them, which was
impressive. However, her retelling skills began to lack towards to end of the assessment and so
she lost points on the Resolution and the Ending/Reactions of the Characters. This was because
she simplified the resolution by simply stating that "the troll fell off the bridge" instead of
mentioning Big Billy ramming the troll off the bridge. She also lost a point on the Ending or
Reactions of the Characters because she did summarize the ending by saying that "the three goats
crossed the bridge and got to the grass" but did not describe the reactions or emotions of the
characters. Overall, her retelling of the story The Three Billy Goats Gruff was well-described and
followed along well with the story, so Rachel scored well on the retelling assessment with a
score of 13 points. This shows that has a strong concept of retelling and is able to effectively and
efficiently retell a story, which shows that this student has good comprehension skills.
Implications on Future Instruction
Since Rachel scored so well on this story retelling assessment with the story The Three
Billy Goats Gruff, I believe that she is capable to doing retellings with other, more difficult
books. I think that assessing Rachel's retelling skills on a longer story or a more conceptually or
linguistically challenging story would be the next best step for her future instruction. That way
the teacher could learn of the limits on her retelling abilities, which would also tie into her level
of comprehension for the stories she is attempting to retell. Rachel is an emergent reader, but I
think that through use of more retellings with more challenging stories, she could progress into
the stage of a beginning reader. This is the next level that a teacher would want Rachel to
progress to as a reader, so any way of moving her to this level would be desired and used in her
future literacy instruction.
*Denotes pseudonym to maintain the confidentiality of the student