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My favorite strategy to teach summarization!

Reading Standard 2 is all about summarizing, an extremely important skill. In fact, Tim Shanahan, one of our nation’s leading literacy experts, says, “Of all of the literacy activities that you could [focus] on, summarizing is the most powerful…”

I’m going to share my favorite summarization strategy that works with any text in any grade.

All you need is a good text and sticky notes.

Ok, lots of sticky notes.

Before reading, ask students to circle the important words while they read. Tell them that while you look around the room you should see eyes on text, pencils in hands, and students occasionally circling words.

After students read independently, give each student around 5 sticky notes.

Have them look through the words they circled and choose their top five most important words.

Then students will write each word (or short phrase) on each sticky note. The bigger the better, use markers if you’re feeling adventurous.

As students are finishing, have them bring the sticky notes up to a blank wall or board (or roll out some bulletin board paper).

Once everyone has their sticky notes up, ask them my favorite question: “What do you notice?”

They’ll usually first talk about which words were chosen most often. Ask for a few people to explain why they picked these words. Emphasis that when we write our summary, these are words we will probably want to use.

Choose a few words that only one person picked and ask the author to share his/her reasoning. Usually it’s more insightful then you’d think. Be sure to be clear that they aren’t wrong for choosing a word no one else did.

Sometimes a certain word will be picked frequently because it was funny or weird or stood out to them. This is a good opportunity to discuss how some key details may stand out to us, but they may not be important enough to be included in a summary.

Facilitate the conversation based on how the graph reveals their thinking. You can’t script good teaching.

You aren’t done yet!

Now have students go back to their seats and write a summary. This strategy just adds a step of discussion and analysis between reading and writing, which should improve their comprehension and writing.

Have them share their summaries with their group. Wrap up the lesson with a quick whole-group discussion.

Now you’re done!

One More Thought

This strategy works really well for informational texts, especially descriptive sciencey ones. I have also used it to compare evidence in literature. For example, if you’re reading The Hound of the Baskervilles and discussing who killed Sir Charles, you could make a bar group with the character names along the bottom and have students collect evidence on their sticky notes to make a class visual about who they are suspecting so far. Add to it as you read and discuss.

You could also use it to have small groups determine an author’s main points along the x-axis and then graph the evidence that supports each point (Reading Informational Standard 8).

Have you ever used this strategy before? Try it out and let me know how it goes in the comments below!

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References

Shanahan, T. (2019, July 13). How to Teach Summarizing, Part I. Shanahan on Literacy. https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/how-to-teach-summarizing-part-i

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