Warburton East Juniors

Creating Curious Readers and Writers!

Oral retell is a powerful literacy strategy where children re-state a story or experience in their own words, helping to boost comprehension, vocabulary and sequencing skills.

This term, our P–2 junior students at the Warburton East Campus have had a shared focus on building curiosity, vocabulary and understanding of new words within context.

To support this learning, students listen to a read aloud text (‘Oi Cat’ by Kes Gray), discuss new vocabulary within the story and explore the concept of oral storytelling and narrative structure. Some of the key vocabulary highlighted in the text included: gnat, shame, nibble, pheasant and frowned.

The focus of our first oral retell was to summarise and identify the main ideas and events within a text.

“Hairy Maclary snuck into the delivery van.” 

Grade Prep student

“In ‘Hairy Maclary, Shoo’, he looked wearily in the story on every page.” 

Grade 1 student

“The main character in the story is Hairy Maclary. He is a black dog with wire-like hair who gets himself into trouble.” 

Grade 2 student

Throughout the term, students will continue using a range of engaging mentor texts to explore characters, settings, problems and resolutions in logical order. These texts include ‘Hairy Maclary, Shoo’ by Lynley Dodd, ‘It’s My Bird-Day’ by Mo Willems, ‘The Very Busy Spider’ by Eric Carle and ‘The Invisible String’ by Patrice Karst.