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This study concerns the processes of storytelling and remembering in the context of how 4-5-year-old children orally retell stories they have been told by a teacher. Understanding children’s retellings as a sense-making activity, the analytic focus is on what children pick up from, and how they transform, the story. The storytelling activities have been video recorded, transcribed and analyzed from a sociocultural theoretical perspective. With an interest in studying the nature of narrative activity, three retelling activities of one focus child were chosen for analysis. The results show that the child remembers details, introduces new elements and in various ways transforms the story. On a more overarching level, the study shows how the child’s retelling and remembering are clearly related to the sense she makes of the story and the activity she engages in. This implies that narrative practices contain an important reflexivity; when teachers support the processes of storytelling and remembering, they also support children’s sense making, and conversely, when supporting children’s understanding of stories, teachers assist children’s remembering.

How children understand the psychology of a story (i.e., the intentions and experiences of its characters) is pivotal to comprehending its point. In this study we investigate empirically how 5-year-old children in a Japanese kindergarten manage mental state verbs and adjectives when collaboratively retelling a tale heard. The tale, an example of a kitsune trickster story about anthropomorphized foxes interacting with humans, contains a number of critical events concerning expected and actual discrepancy between intentions/expectations and outcomes of actions. The empirical data consist of collaboratively retold stories. These have been recorded and transcribed. Theoretically, the study is informed by a sociocultural perspective, emphasizing the appropriation of the intramental function of cultural tools (importantly, in this case, of mental state discourse) through intermental communication, such as joint storytelling. The findings show how the children make use of mental state verbs and adjectives denoting psychological (intellectual and emotional) processes when retelling the story as well as afterwards for rendering their impressions of the story.