Paraphrase/Retell Back to 20 Best-practices Reading Strategies Paraphrasing is restating or explaining ideas in your own words while retaining the meaning and ideas in the original selection. Retelling captures all of the main ideas with most of the supporting details. Paraphrasing helps young readers check their own comprehension. Questions that invite students paraphrase information: How can you put these facts into your own words? Which words capture the main ideas from this selection? How can you use the list of key words to make your own fact statements? If you wrote the key ideas as a grocery list, how would you compact the text? Which items are essential to the list? Which items can be omitted? What was your purpose for reading? Which details matched your goals? Which details were irrelevant to your purposes for reading the article? What questions did you want answered in the text? What answers were revealed?   This Season Teachers Kids Orientation Registration Search Copyright 1997-2008 Journey North. All Rights Reserved. Questions or comments? Contact us.