Retelling and summarizing are great ways to get children involved in what they're reading--and thinking about what they understand in texts. Summarizing is a more complex task than retelling. Creating a formal summary usually involves reducing a text by about a third, writing a topic statement, eliminating redundant and unimportant details, and more. A teacher can help students make the transition from retelling to summarizing by encouraging them to paraphrase. In a retelling, students often rely on the author's words. With paraphrasing, they use their own words to tell or write about what happens in a text. This article includes a reproducible event map with instructions to use pictures or words to retell the events of the story in the correct order.