Summarization Strategies for Teen Writers


Writing instruction often involves explicitly and systematically how to summarize texts. Researchers determined that summarization techniques ranged from explicit teaching of strategies to enhancing the strategies that the students already knew. Overall, teaching teen writers to summarize text has a consistent, strong, positive effect on their ability to comprehend a variety of texts.
Here are some quick summarizing strategies that you can implement immediately into your classroom:
  • List three main points of today's lesson and one question that you have.
  • Answer the following questions: So what? What did you learn today?
  • List three important points from today's lesson and the most important point from today's lesson.
  • List four points that you learned; list three points that you are unsure of; list one question that you still have.
  • RAFT: Role, audience, format, task
  • Word Splash: Students are given keywords from the lesson, and they have to use those words in meaningful ways to summarize the teaching or text.
Should you grade these summarizing techniques? Well, I don't know if you should, but I grade everything with the same rubric.

What is summarizing? Summarizing is the restating of the main ideas of the text in as few words as possible. It can be done in writing, orally, dramatically, or musically. Extensive research shows that summarizing is a core strategy for learning the material in any content area.

One of my personal favorites is "Somebody wanted but so." I usually use this strategy after students have read a text. Students read the text independently, then create a sentence using the basic strategy structure.

Who wanted something?
What did he want?
What was the fundamental conflict?
What was the resolution?

"Tom Sawyer wanted to be lazy, but he had to whitewash the fence. So, he developed a scheme to get his friends to pay him to do it for him."

"Back to the Essentials" is a superb summarizing technique for students. Give students any text with multiple paragraphs. Students label the paper with the title of the article and number the sections. The students then outline the main idea of each paragraph.

Summarizing a text fosters understanding of that text. By sifting through a text to extract the most important ideas and weave them into a concisely written summary addresses many standards.

The objectives for a lesson on summarizing should be the following:
  • To understand the importance of summarizing.
  • To recognize the essential parts of a good summary.
  • To summarize literary texts.
  • To summarize informational documents.
When you tell people about a movie that you have recently seen, you are summarizing. When you summarize a text, you briefly retell the main ideas or key events using your words. As you may already know, the plot is the series of incidents in a story. A summary of a story's plot should include the most important events, conflicts, and characters. Because a summary should not include minor or less important details, it will be much shorter than the original text. For example, a summary of a short story might consist of several sentences while a summary of a novel might consist of several paragraphs.

What makes a good summary? An excellent summary helps you to understand what happens in a text even if you have not read the original.

Example:
The story "Life is a Stage" tells about three friends who join their school's drama club. The students learn the importance of hard work before their first performance.

Example:
"Cross-Country" by Megan Grace follows Carmen Richards and her family as they move from California to Maryland. As the family travels across the United States, they encounter one obstacle after another. The family learns to make the best of a bad situation and becomes closer as a result.

Here are some suggested stories for students to read and summarize:

"The School Play" by Gary Soto
"The Good Deed" by Marian Dane Bauer
"All Summer in a Day" by Ray Bradbury
"Lob's Girl" by Joan Aiken
"Woodsong" by Gary Paulsen
"Seventh Grade" by Gary Soto
"The Last Dog" by Katherine Paterson
"Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" by Rudyard Kipling
"Raymond's Run" by Toni Cade Bambara
"The Ransom of Red Chief" by O'Henry
"Clean Sweep" Joan Bauer

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Scout's Honor" by Avi

Image
I've created a learning resource to go along with the short story that you can find in my shop. My students have been telling me that it's quite difficult. We've done two pages per day as part of our reading workshop minilessons. They're writing the notes and responses in their journals. The grammar connection on infinitives really threw them for a loop~it was the first time that they've encountered this verbal. Melissa
Read more

Back to School Bumper Sticker Activity and Printable

Image
Here in Middle Tennessee, we go back to school in two weeks, so it's the perfect time to begin thinking about icebreaker activities.  My Back to school Bumper Sticker Printable and Activity includes 20 different bumper stickers, 10 color and 10 black and white. There are 2 bumper stickers per page. Use this as an icebreaker in the following way: Students brainstorm some bumper stickers that they've seen and what those bumper stickers say about the person driving the car. Then, the students will write down several bumper sticker sayings that represent them and their ideas or beliefs. Show students some examples of completed bumper stickers. Afterwards, give each student a copy of the bumper sticker template. Each student designs and creates a bumper sticker that represents him or her. After students have created their bumper stickers, they walk around the room reading each other's bumper stickers. This activity is a fun and creati...
Read more

Heinrich Schliemann

Image
Heinrich Schliemann loved stories aobut ancient Greece. He dreamed of finding Troy, an ancient city destroyed during the Trojan War. In 1871, Schliemann began to dig through a human-made mound in Hissarlik, Turkey. Two years later, he uncovered the remains of a mysterious ancient city in the area where Troy stood. Some archaeologists believe that Schliemann actually found Troy. Others are unsure. Nevertheless, his work led to the discovery of many ancient Greek treasures. Because of his work, Schliemann is considered the founder of prehistoric Greek archaeology. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons Human history has become too much a matter of dogma taught by professionals in ivory towers as though it's all fact. Actually, much of human history is up for grabs. The further back you go, the more that the history that's taught in the schools and universities begins to look like some kind of faerie story.
Read more