Over the past two weeks, we have done several stories: including Senor Wooly’s La Invitación, La Confesión de Víctor, a movietalk for El Gato con Café, a Movietalk and Story for Bomba’s Estereo Soy Yo video, and a PictureTalk for Biblioburro.

In addition to the class story, students have also practiced on quizlet and answered comprehension questions while watching the video on Edpuzzle.com. They have had sufficient input and this allowed us to move to the next step…. output.

I took screen shots of important parts from each story and created a page for each story. This serves as a reference sheet for students. You can view that here: StoryRetell_PicturePrompt. Then I had the students get with a partner. Each group had 1 sheet of paper to write on and I passed out the picture prompts of the stories. The student rotated roles: One student was the writer and the other student was the storyteller.

The storyteller had to to retell the story to the writer. The writer would help the storyteller with any grammar or vocabulary. I set a timer for 4 minutes (or 5 minutes). After the time was up, partners switched roles and the group passed the pictures to the next group. At the end of the period, each group had written about all 5 stories.

At the end of class, I collected papers. This would be about the only time I make corrections to student’s work…. only because I wanted to use it as more input for the next day.

The following day, students sit in a circle and I pass the papers back out to students. Students read them to each other and then pass them around. So by the end, they ended up reading the 5 stories several times.

Then I have the students record themselves retelling the story. They can use the pictures as a reference. These are nice to share with parents to show how talented your students are.

Here’s an example: