The Little Red Hen Retell Literacy Center Activity
Create your own The Little Red Hen retelling activity with this free download for kindergarten.
This is how I created a Little Red Hen 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 Little Red Hen late in the early spring.
Students love the voices for the characters and it lends itself to talking about “a reader’s voice” which many of my students are developing at this time.
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.
My kinders get to choose the book(s) they want to retell while they are at this literacy center. This one is usually a favorite.
What’s in my Little Red Hen 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 printed the large animal “masks” from Jan Brett’s site. I added large paint sticks (but you could also do popsicle sticks or tongue depressors) with strong packing tape.
I found the little hen in a stash of stuffed animals I had – random, I know.
I also wanted to engage more students in recognizing the repeated phrases in the book so I have those on sentence strips. They like to order them sometimes or hold them up when reading like cue cards.
We held the sentence strips up almost like cue cards to engage the audience when we retold this book as a class before turning it into an independent activity.
How to make your own Little Red Hen retell activtiy
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
- The Little Red Hen Printable Characters (Same animals as found in “The Hat” if you use the Lucinda McQueen version)
- or The Little Red Hen Printables (Cat, Dog, Pig, Duck/Goose)
- Paint Sticks
- Tape
- Stuffed Chicken (Dressed in an apron of course – kidding, but probably a bonus)
- The Little Red Hen Book by Lucinda McQueen
What to do
Take your book copy and your animals from the book and place them together. A container like an open basket, a book bin or a large Ziploc bag will work!
If you want to do phrases on sentence strips, then choose the most repeated phrases from the book and write them onto sentence strips or callout bubbles and laminate.
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.
More versions of The Little Red Hen we love
I love using this story to remind students partway through the year of expectations in working with others.
If you love reading this story, then I can also recommend these versions of the book to read after. We discuss the different endings when sometimes she shares and other times she doesn’t.
{I have them ALL!}
- The Little Red Hen by Carol Ottolenghi
- The Little Red Hen by Paul Galdone
- The Little Red Hen Makes a Pizza
- Not Now Said the Cow
- Help Yourself, Little Red Hen
Conclusion
There you have it – how to make a Little Red Hen 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.
