A:It is very common for students of all ages to start on the journey of summarizing through a retell. They must master learning how to retell a story first, with the next step being to retell with just the most important ideas in order of events.

Once children can retell important ideas in sequence, they are ready to begin prioritizing those important ideas and move to summarizing.

It takes hundreds of opportunities of retelling stories and hearing a skilled summary modeled before we can expect students to do either one well. Therefore, we begin modeling and having our youngest children practice retelling from the very start. We also model, model, model summarizing before we ever ask our children to give it a try.