Something for the weekend: Retelling stories

This is the second in our series of posts with quick and hopefully simple ideas for you to try this weekend.  We all know that life gets busy and although we all have the best intentions of helping with home work and practising targets, it can be really hard to find the time, get everything ready and to then catch your child in the right mood to do the work. So we have decided to write these posts to help you save time and get work done!

In our first post we gave you some ideas about vocabulary.  You can read that post here. Today I am going to write about retelling stories or events.  We use our language in a number of ways: asking and answering questions, commenting, giving and following instructions – to name a few.  Another important skill we need to learn is how to retell events or stories.  This involves us remembering what happened, and the order, getting the right words and making a coherent sentence!  It is actually quite complicated.  It is something that many children, not just those with language difficulties, find tricky.

What you need:-

• Yourself
• Your child/ the children you are working with
• Your phone/ camera

Activity:-

You can choose the activity this week!  If you happen to be going somewhere, then great you can use that.  If you just go for a walk or play in the park that’s fine.  This weekend, you might be making snowmen!  Even if you stay at home and do some house work  – any activity will work.  The ideas is that you take pictures of your child completing an activity.

Now for younger children, you may only want to take 3 or 4 pictures.  So one at the start, one in the middle and one at the end.  Keep it simple.  For older children you can take more to make the task a bit trickier.  If your older child is a budding photographer, they could take the pictures!  The idea is that afterwards, you can look back at the pictures on your phone and talk about them.

Level 1

If your child is just starting to use and link words, encourage them to look at the pictures and say whats happening.  It’s OK if you have to say it first until they get the idea.  As an example I am going to use going down a slide.  For the first picture you could say, “climbing up”, then maybe your next picture is “getting ready” or “sitting down” and then the last picture could be “weeeee!” or “sliding down”.

In this way you are using the pictures to help them remember and modelling the language they need to use.  You can repeat this activity as many times as you like!  Most children like looking back at things they have done in photos, so it gives you more opportunities to practise using the language.

Level 2

If your child is starting to use short sentences to talk about the pictures, you can introduce the time words, first – next – last to their descriptions.  Again you will need to show them how to do this first e.g. “look, first you climbed up the ladder, next you sat down and then last you slid all the way down.  This is an important step and teaches that the order of events is important!

Level 3

If your child is using sentences and some of the time words from the previous level, you can move on to making the sentences more exciting!  We do this by adding adjectives – which are describing words such as huge, purple or bumpy.  You can also include adverbs – these describe the verb and include words such as quickly, carefully or adventurously!

Get you child to retell the story, then together see if you can think of some describing words.  Colour words are easy to add in, but can they think about how the slide felt?  Was it bumpy or smooth? Clean or muddy?  Once you have through of some exciting words, show your child where in the sentence they need to go.  So they “zoomed down the muddy slide” (not zoomed down the slide muddy!)

Level 4

To really extend this task, we are going to make the sentences into a story.  Talk about how you were feeling and what you saw.  Were there any good noises or smells?  Really describe the park.

“One snowy day we all excitedly put on our wellies and coats and crunched out to the park.  We were the first people to leave our footprints in the smooth, white snow. We rushed to huge, twisty slide and clambered to the top.  I was first.  I peeped down the slide and felt a little nervous – it was a long way down!  But I did it!  I zoomed down and fell plop into the snow at the bottom!”

Your child is unlikely to generate this level of detail in their first try, but give suggestions – what did it look like? How did it feel? What did you see?  Each time they go over the story see if they can add in a new description.

Do have fun, whatever you are doing this weekend and remember to keep that camera ready!  After you’ve tried this activity, do come into our Facebook group and let us know how you got on.

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