Let’s face it: teaching summarizing can feel like trying to teach a cat to fetch. 
Sure, it might happen eventually—but it’s going to take patience, creativity, and possibly snacks. Summarizing is one of those deceptively tough skills. It sounds simple—“just tell me the important stuff”—but getting students to actually condense a text without turning it into a word soup or a 5-page essay?
Whether your students are condensing a chapter, a movie plot, or last night’s epic dodgeball drama, these six easy-to-implement strategies will give them the tools to summarize with confidence—and maybe even a little joy.
Oh, and don’t miss the free handout on summarizing strategies below! It includes printables for each strategy plus directions that make classroom life easier.
General Summarizing Guidelines
Before diving into summarizing strategies, give students a structure to stand on:
- Highlight the topic sentence of each paragraph.
- Cross out any fluff—irrelevant details and dramatic tangents.
- Eliminate repeated ideas (if they said it twice, the summary needs it zero times).
- Group-related info (baseball, soccer, and football? Boom—sports).
These steps offer a simple way to teach students how to extract the important stuff.
Six Summarizing Strategies to Teach
Strategy #1 – The 5Ws and How
This classic works across content areas. Students answer:
- Who was involved?
- What happened?
- When did it happen?
- Where did it take place?
- Why did it happen?
- How was the problem solved?
📚 Example:
Squanto helped the Pilgrims survive the winter by teaching them how to farm, fish, and hunt.
Simple, structured, effective.
Strategy #2 – Somebody Wanted But So Then
Perfect for fiction, history, or even the school gossip chain. Students fill in:
- Somebody: main character
- Wanted: what they wanted
- But: the problem
- So: what they did
- Then: how it ended
Example:Columbus wanted a safer route to India, but lacked funding. So he asked the Spanish royals. Then he sailed into the history books (and some serious controversy).
Bonus tip: pair this with the “Peck Pocketed” animated short—students will love summarizing the feathered heist.
This adaptable framework makes it ideal for summarizing everything from fictional narratives to historical events.
To further enrich your summarizing lessons, consider incorporating animated shorts like “Peck Pocketed” to engage students in a fun way. In this animated short, a bird dreams of living in a luxurious home like the one he sees in a magazine. To achieve this, he begins stealing items from a napping woman on a park bench to decorate his nest. Using the included handout, students can summarize the short by identifying key elements of the story.
Strategy #3 – GIST Summaries (20 Words or Fewer)
Because rambling is the enemy of summarizing.
- Divide the text into chunks.
- After each chunk, summarize in one concise sentence.
- At the end, combine them for a full (and brief!) summary.
✍️ Helps students focus on the core message, especially with denser nonfiction texts.
Strategy #4 – Webbing
For your visual learners and doodlers:
- Center bubble = main idea
- Branches = supporting details
- Expand using timelines, Venn diagrams, or hierarchical maps.
It’s basically a graphic organizer that says, “Let me help you see what matters.”
Strategy #5 – Two-Column Notes
Clean, simple, and great for nonfiction:
- Fold the paper.
- Left side = main ideas.
- Right side = supporting info.
This strategy’s perfect when students are working with heavy content and need to organize their thoughts.
Strategy #6 – Jigsaw Reading
Turn students into experts and teachers:
- Split a text into sections.
- Assign each student a section to master.
- Regroup and have them teach each other.
🧩 Students summarize in their own words and develop a deeper understanding of the material. That’s cooperative learning magic.
Summarizing Strategies Stem Questions That Spark Thinking
Use these to guide student responses during practice:
- What’s the main idea?
- What are the key points?
- What info is essential?
- How can you say it in your own words?
These prompts turn summarizing into a conversation rather than a chore.
Summarizing doesn’t have to feel like pulling teeth from a porcupine. With these strategies, your students can confidently extract meaning, condense complex texts, and even enjoy the process.
Don’t forget to grab the free handout—it includes printables and directions for every strategy mentioned above.
This reading skills unit focuses on summarizing. All lessons and activities are provided in both digital and printable formats.
Check out these additional blog posts for summarizing.
Using Animated Shorts to Teach Summarizing – Free printables help students evaluate the animated short.
Learning Log – A Teaching Strategy – This post includes handouts of a $2 Summary, 3-2-1 Strategy, and Square, Triangles, Circle.
Inverted Pyramid Story – This post includes four nonfiction text printables for students to find the main points (Who? What? When? Where? How? Why?) in the opening paragraph or two.
