Focus on comprehension: retrieval
Quick Tips for Comprehension: Retrieval
Whether you’re teaching Guided, Close or Whole Class Reading, one of the essential skills you want your children to acquire is the skill of retrieval. In this short article we share some quick and easy techniques to help your class retrieve key information from texts. All of the suggestions here are lo-fi and designed to save you time whilst having a clear focus on retrieving and recording key information from texts.
Retrieving and recalling characters
After reading a chapter, section of text or book, ask the children to make a list of all the characters. Alternatively, ask children to write the name of each character on a separate slip of paper – doing this gives you the flexibility to ask children to group and categorise characters e.g. goodies/ baddies; helpful/unhelpful; adults/ children etc. Having the names of characters on slips of paper also gives you the scope to ask children to draw webs of connections between the characters and so establish an understanding of different relationships in a text.
Retrieving and recalling narrative structure
Encouraging children to recall and retell events from a story is a great way to help them internalise the structure of the story. Provide children with graphic organisers such as timelines and story mountains and ask them to populate these with information from the text. They can then use these to help them give oral retellings of the story and so come to recall and remember the passage of events more clearly. Creating storyboards and comic strips is represent the narrative in a different format is also an enjoyable and effective way to recall the structure and series of events in a story.
We should never forget the importance of role play for helping children to recall events from stories. I appreciate the thought of Class 9 all role playing the Final Battle from the Lion the Witch and The Wardrobe is fearsome idea, but don’t forget that using Small World figures or making simple stick puppets is an acceptable alternative.
Retrieving and recalling events
We’ve just considered some quick and easy ways to record the series of events in a story but what about being able to identify the high and low points within a story? A simple bar chart is an extremely useful way for scaffolding children to think about the events in a story and to grade them according to their level of drama. Whilst you might assume the highpoint of a narrative would be the top of the story mountain, many stories don’t follow this structure and may have a series of high points that could be assessed by the children. While this is slightly more evaluative than pure retrieval it’s extremely effective for helping children to determine which events were the most or least dramatic points in a narrative. It will probably also push them towards evaluative conversations where they need to refer to the text to justify their opinions.
Retrieving key facts
When reading non-fiction books ask children to make notes about key facts. As children find note-taking difficult, suggesting that these be short or singular bullet points is a good idea. Extend their note-making by asking children to make short fact files using their notes – putting these on slips of paper or sticky notes is a useful way to help them keep their notes brief. By using separate slips of paper for different facts, they can also begin to categorise their facts into sections.
Assessing their recall and retrieval
You’re bound to ask the children questions about what they’ve read. Flip this by asking children to devise their own retrieval questions to try on their reading partner. True/ false questions are easy to devise and because they contain the correct answer, should avoid those awkward incorrect answers. In a similar way, with older children consider asking them to devise multiple choice questions to increase the challenge for their readers.
These are just a few ideas for easy to implement retrieval activities. If you’d like further ideas for Content Domain 1b and 2b and the rest of the Key Stages 1 and 2 Content Domains, just click below to download our FREE Reading Journals booklets.
If you liked this article, you may also enjoy these:
Guided Reading - a range of advice on how to get the most from guided reading lessons.
Any Questions: Consideration of the Reading Content Domain - a short explainer on the Content Domain, what it’s for and resources to support its use in school.