Staff Sounder
October 17, 2016
Sensational Summarizing Strategies (improving reading comprehension)
Summarizing is an essential reading skill I teach early and often in my classroom. Even for advanced readers, it's a skill that requires continual practice. Summarizing is a skill that requires students to piece together and condense the key ideas and details of a large piece of text into concise understanding of a text's main points. To successfully summarize a text, students must first determine important information while disregarding irrelevant information.
Here are a few quick ideas to develop your students' sensational summarizing skills:
Somebody-Wanted-But-So-Then This tried and true strategy is my go-to standby as a quick method to help students determine the key details in order to summarize a fictional text. For this strategy, students respond to five short prompts as they identify important literary and plot elements of a story.
*Somebody: Who is the main character(s)?
*Wanted: What did the main character want?
*But: What problems did the main character encounter? What obstacles prevented the main character from getting what s/he wanted? (conflict)
*So: How did the main character solve the problem? (climax)
*Then: How did the story end? What did the main character learn as a result of the problem? (resolution)
Haiku Chapter Summary I borrowed the idea for haiku chapter summaries from a fabulously creative teacher, Christine Visich. This strategy combines the form and structure of haiku poetry with succinct summaries of a text. Since haikus use short phrases to capture a poignant feeling or image, this strategy forces students to be concise and select only the most important information from a text for their summaries. These pithy haikus are just the right length to summarize chapters of a book or sections of a text. The three lines of these haiku summaries follow the standard 5/7/5 syllable count.
*Line one: 5 syllables
*Line two: 7 syllables
*Line three: 5 syllables
Here's an example of a haiku summary based on the short story The Scarlet Ibis by James Hurst:
Let's make Doodle walk
Knot of cruelty takes over
He is pushed too hard
These haikus can easily be written on a sticky note and kept in the books as a reference for students. Haiku summaries are not only developing an important reading skill, but they also encourage students to practice beautiful and creative writing.
Sentence-Phrase-Word Sentence-Phrase-Word is an excellent summarizing strategy to use with a small group of students as they work together to capture the crux of a shared text. It is a great strategy to use with a group because it encourages students to talk with each other as they develop a collective understanding of a text. After reading a text, students select an important sentence, then phrase, then word that capture the meaning of a text. The students then share in three rounds their selections with their group members and justify their choices with an explanation.
*Round 1: Choose one sentence from the text that was meaningful to you and connects to an important idea of the text.
*Round 2: Select one compelling phrase from the text that best connects to the main idea of the section.
*Round 3: Choose a single word that captures both your attention and the important idea of the text.
I enjoy listening in to these group conversations as trends and common themes start to emerge.
-John DePasquale; October 3, 2016