We encourage kids to speak when they want. We don’t force them to do so. That means that in a story, during the story or at the end, we can ask a kid to recycle the information up to a certain point in the story (recycling) or retell the entire story at the end.
If there are no volunteers, we can and should recycle and retell the information ourselves. I like to do the retell with the artist’s work – the kids really key in on the images drawn by the artist and they become completely unaware of the language, which alone (focusing on the meaning and not the words) brings real acquisition.
Occasionally, a child will surprise with a nice retell. We have such an example from one of Sabrina’s students. In this video we see a second year student. He did a great retell (of the story we saw on video last month from the Jim Tripp story script Le Jour de Saint Valentin) in less than a minute –