The Fat Cat Retell Literacy Center Activity

Create your own Fat Cat retelling activity with this free idea for kindergarten.

This is how I created a Fat Cat retell activity to go in our retell center as a storytelling option for my kindergarten students.

Let me show you what’s in our set and give you the materials to make it happen in your classroom too.

It’s one of my favorite literacy centers and we usually introduce the book The Fat Cat: A Danish Folktale by Jack Kent whenever I have an odd week in the school calendar that is sandwiched between other themes I've planned.

If you're unfamiliar with this book - that's okay! It's similar to these growing-pattern books:

Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything
The Jacket I Wear In the Snow

They would work great too for this center if you have them. Simply follow the same steps below to make your own retelling set with the book you have.

When students are retelling at this center, they read they act, they use lots of great vocabulary and are developing fantastic reading habits all while continuing to build their love of reading.

What's in my retell set

Here are the props I gathered rather inexpensively (and you can too) to bring the book alive once we knew it by heart.

I simply scanned pages from the book of each character. After I laminated them, I added popsicle sticks onto the back using book tape or clear mailing tape.

How to make your own Fat Cat retell activity

If you plan to make this a year-long literacy center, I highly recommend that you read the Retell Literacy Center Directions for more details and making everything run smooth.

Because you can make this kindergarten activity yourself and once you and your students are hooked on retelling you’ll want to make this a year-long thing.

Here are the materials you’ll need… (may include affiliate book links to Amazon)

Materials

Scanned pictures (laminated)
Tape
Popsicle Sticks
The Fat Cat Book by Jack Kent

What to do

Use your phone or school scanner to scan and print photos of characters from the book. Laminate and add popsicle sticks onto the back with strong packaging tape.

Take your book copy and props and place them together. A container like an open basket, a book bin or a large Ziploc bag will work!

We liked to keep a blanket nearby these materials so that they could create a theater-like puppet stage to sit behind.

But all they need to do is have the book and the materials and use the props to tell as much as they can:

about the story
from the story
with the story (following along)

Encourage kinders to use as many words from the text as they can remember. With a patterned story like this one, it’s pretty easy, especially if you read this story multiple times before you release it to your students.

Conclusion

There you have it – how to make a Fat Cat retell activity for your class. I love that it doesn’t require much to get it done. {wink}

If you like this activity, check out this list of 20 more famous stories that are great for retelling in kindergarten. Most of them are just as simple to pull together and I’ve found all of the downloadable resources for you.