Summarize text; include important details

If you see readers who . . .

• are not remembering what they read.
• report so many details that the deeper meaning of what they were reading is lost.

As readers we need to absorb the meaning of a passage and then capture the most important elements in our own words. This helps us remember and understand what we have read.

To summarize successfully, you must be able to capture the most important parts of the text and express them briefly, so you can remember the text more easily.

During our chapter book read-aloud, we begin modeling how to summarize. Before we begin a chapter, we summarize what happened in the previous chapter, stating the main ideas and using story elements to organize the summary.

We model discerning important from nonimportant information that we would include in our summary. After modeling a few attempts alone, we work together with students to identify the main ideas in the previous chapters.

In primary classes, we choose an artist of the day, who draws or paints a picture of the most important information from the chapter just read. We meet with the child to write the main ideas they drew or painted, finally compiling a class book summarizing the read-aloud. This book becomes the anchor we refer to when speaking about summaries.

With older students we model writing summaries of the chapters from our class readaloud, verbalizing our thinking as we decide what is important and worth noting and what details we will leave out because they're less significant. Once we think students understand how to write a summary, this may become a weekly expectation and part of their response journal that is graded.

Suggested language:

• What is this selection about?
• What are the main ideas of this selection? What is your evidence?
• What is not important to remember in this selection? Why?

Possible ways to differentiate instruction:

• Summarizing is used often in reading but is challenging for many of our students. If it does pose a challenge, often it is because students are trying to retell the whole story with great detail and don't know how to cut it down to the most critical elements. That is when we step in with more modeling, either with the whole group, in small groups, or one-on-one, depending on the number of students who need the strategy.
• At times finding key words or phrases may be helpful to support readers in articulating the main point of a selection.

Reconsider materials, setting, instruction, and cognitive processes.

This strategy may provide support before, during, and after teaching this strategy:

• Retell; Include Sequence of Main Events