Introduction: Oral narratives are increasingly used as ecologically valid assessments of early language development, as they reflect children’s higher language skills in naturalistic environments. This study examined overall story organization (macrostructure) in narratives produced by typically developing Sinhala-speaking preschool children aged 3;5–4;11 from Colombo District, across two picture-supported storytelling tasks: story retelling and story generation. Objective: To describe and compare children’s use of core macrostructure elements across tasks. Methods: Narratives were elicited from 64 children using a six-picture retell of a model story and a parallel six-picture story generation task. Stories were scored using an adapted macrostructure rubric comprising character, setting, initiating episode, internal response, plan, action, and consequence. Results: Across tasks and ages, children achieved higher scores for character and action. Scores were consistently low for setting, and markedly lower for internal response and plan.Overall macrostructure scores were higher in retelling than in generation. Older children outperformed younger peers on all components, although their narratives still showed emerging episode structure. This pattern is consistent with international findings that 3–5 year old children can describe basic event sequences, but have more difficulty providing contextual information, and expressing mental states and goal directed aspects of stories. Conclusions: The results highlight the need in developmental paediatrics to interpret incomplete and poorly planned narratives in this age group as developmentally constrained rather than pathological. The study outcomes support the inclusion of structured retell and generation tasks in early screening programmes in Sri Lanka and longitudinal monitoring of children’s language development.