The Very Quiet Cricket Retell Literacy Center Activity
Create your own Very Quiet Cricket retelling activity with this free download for kindergarten.
This is how I created a Very Quiet Cricket 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 Very Quiet Cricket by Eric Carle during an insect-themed week or when working through other Eric Carle books.
This book goes over the best with my students when they are learning to recognize patterns in a story since this pattern is very prominent. Plus, we learn lots of insect names which is a vocabulary plus.
They are mesmerized by the sound at the end of the book and most haven’t read this book before so they love it!
We retell this story as part of our normal weekly routine and then it’s released to them. Simple as that!
When they retell this story at the retell 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.
The large wings were in the dress-up section of the dollar tree and are for the silent Luna Moth.
The large grasshopper is a beautiful hand puppet that was donated to my classroom.
The small insects are from the dollar tree as well and were part of an insect plastic creature set.
How to make your own Very Quiet Cricket 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
- The Very Quiet Cricket Sequencing Cards (free download)
- Various Insects (stuffed animal or plastic): Cicada, Moth, Grasshopper, Cricket, Praying Mantis
- The Very Quiet Cricket Book by Eric Carle
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 don’t want to plastic creatures, like I used, then you could print the free sequencing cards and add popsicle sticks onto the back.
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 Very Quiet Cricket retell activity for your class.
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.
