In my kindergarten classroom, I have students who are performing at all different levels.  Many of my students attended preschools where they learned skills that surpass early kindergarten expectations, and some of my students came in with no prior knowledge.  When I began my research, I was working on building basic skills for some of my students.  This included rhyming games, folding in strategies with sight words and letters, and letter sound sorts.  At the same time, I was working on challenging my students who were surpassing expectations.  To challenge these students, we began to read sentences and answer comprehension questions about text.  All students continued to show growth with the skills being taught.

​

The majority of my students were mastering kindergarten literacy skills such as rhyming, letter name recognition, and letter sound recognition.  I saw that my students were continuing to grow rapidly as they became more comfortable decoding written texts, so I chose to push their thinking further and dive into comprehension strategies.  In my district, kindergarten classrooms are pushing students to improve retelling proficiency by the time they enter first grade.  After giving the district common assessment as a baseline, I found that 6 out of 19 of my students did not receive a proficient score, while 5 received advanced scores.  As I observed my students, I also saw that they were not easily able to identify story elements such as characters and setting.  This showed me that I needed to provide scaffolded instruction for students when it came to retelling.  This was the evidence I used to determine that student learning gains would come from improving their retelling proficiency.  

​

In the elementary school setting, reading is the foundation of learning.  Teaching early literacy skills will help prepare students for success in reading.  Therefore, improving retelling proficiency is important because it will help students as they begin to learn more advanced comprehension skills.