More Interactive Writing: Retelling the Gingerbread Man

I'm back with more ideas for Interactive Writing. Here's the post where I detailed how interactive writing is done. You might want to take a break here and read it first!

Interactive Writing Blog Post

We recently read the story, The Gingerbread Man. Here are some of the fun things we did to build comprehension. I made these fun bibs for the kids to wear while we role played the story. Children's ability to retell a story is one of the first indicators that the children comprehended the story. 

We also used our reader's theater. I assigned several kids each the same role, the sat together, and read it chorally. The reader's theater builds prosody. The repeated, rhythmic reading helps to develop fluency as the children "sound like" good readers. 

Now that we were VERY familiar with the story, we made a list of the characters. Be sure and go back to the text to find this! Children do not need to memorize! Good readers know to go back to the text. We can easily model this as we share our thinking about using the text to help us with the sequence. Next, the children got busy making the various characters from the story. Since we ended up with enough pieces to make multiple maps, I divided my kids into several groups. While one group was working with me, the others went off to centers. Using our text, we sequence the characters in the order they appear in the story. We glued them down to make the map.  I repeated this with the other groups.

The next day we were ready to get started with interactive writing. I again, selected one group while the others went to centers. Using their map, we used interactive writing and labeled each character. Then we worked together to create the repeated text from the story. Be sure and read the post mentioned above to know exactly the steps we took during our interactive writing.

Each group also created a child sized gingerbread man.  After the maps were made, each group gathered around their map. While one child was the gingerbread man, the other children selected characters from the story.  The child who was the gingerbread man, took the large gingerbread man and "traveled" him through the story. The other children sat near their character on the map. Each character was responsible for saying their part from the text as the gingerbread man traveled to that part of the story..