Story Retelling & Kindergarten Readiness

Video Transcript

" Hi! My name is Ann and we are here to discuss what makes a successful kindergarten student. In the beginning of the school year, teachers will test for various skills. Okay one of the important things about story retelling is that you can do this at home and you can help your child be a really great learner and ready for kindergarten. So let us see now what is story retelling. It is really quite easy. You read a story for example Three Little Bears or The Three Little Pigs or Billy, you know whatever is your favorite book and what you are going to do is to ask various questions about the story, what happened in the beginning of the story, what happened at the end of the story, how many people are in the story, is there a problem that happened in the story, was there a solution to the story, these are the kinds of questions that you can ask again in a non-stressful fun way. Your child could draw picture of who the characters are in the story. So for example one of my favorites, which is the three bears, I would say hey! Mike, why don’t you sit down and draw how many bears you think are in the story and let us see if they have short term memory that they remember the story, they remember again how many personalities or characters are in the story. Okay another thing to talk about it is what is happening in the beginning, in the middle and the end of the story. Again these are very important questions that your child will learn to answer quickly and efficiently because they will have practice at home before they enter kindergarten or in the beginning of fall semester. Remember these are skills that they will be testing for in many classrooms in California."