Tomahawk Elementary School was awarded a $550 grant for “Expanding Literacy Comprehension and Re-tell” to purchase 50 flannel board sets.
This project aimed to utilize flannel board sets, as a visual aid, in order to focus on the students’ ability to understand the events of a story and re-tell stories accurately. The ability to formulate a narrative is dependent upon the students’ ability to understand the sequential order of events as well as understand the story components (including characters, setting, and emotions). The ability to formulate accurate narratives is imperative for story comprehension, writing tasks and reporting of personal experiences. Additionally, flannel board sets increase student engagement in read alouds as well as aid in vocabulary development and direction following abilities.
The students demonstrated great success with utilizing the flannel board components to follow along with the story, during the read aloud, and then utilize the manipulatives to re-tell the story with varying degrees of prompting from the teachers. The flannel board pieces created a focus for vocabulary instruction as well direction following. The challenges that were faced included maintaining students’ attention, which is imperative to the re-tell tasks as well as varying degrees of engagement based on the age of the students.
