Summarizing can be one of the trickiest skills to teach. Getting students to condense information without losing the main idea is a challenge many teachers face. This post will explore six effective strategies you can use to teach summarizing, including general rules, key questions, and examples. You’ll also find practical classroom tips to make summarizing fun and engaging for your students.
Lesson Handout
Don’t forget to grab the free printable resources to reinforce these strategies in your classroom! This handout includes printables and instructions for all activities listed in this post.
General Summarizing Guidelines
When introducing summarizing, it’s helpful to provide students with clear guidelines. Here are some foundational rules to help students identify key information and eliminate unnecessary details:
- Highlight the topic sentence of each paragraph.
- Cross out irrelevant details that don’t contribute to understanding the passage.
- Remove repeated information that unnecessarily lengthens the text.
- Group related information using categories (e.g., listing “baseball,” “football,” and “soccer” under the category of sports).
These steps give students a structure to work with as they develop their summarizing skills.
Six Strategies to Teach Summarizing
Strategy #1 – The 5Ws and How
This method works across all content areas and helps students focus on key ideas by answering six basic questions:
- Who is involved?
- What is happening?
- When did it happen?
- Where did it occur?
- Why did it happen?
- How was the problem solved or the situation addressed?
By answering these questions, students naturally create a concise text summary. Here’s an example:
Squanto helped the Pilgrims by teaching them to survive in the New World after a harsh first winter. By learning to grow crops, hunt, and fish, the Pilgrims survived.
Strategy #2 – Somebody Wanted But So Then
The “Somebody Wanted But So Then” method is a simple framework that helps students break down a story into its most important parts. It works particularly well with fiction or historical texts.
Here’s how it works:
- Somebody: Identify the character or key figure.
- Wanted: Describe their goal or motivation.
- But: Explain the conflict or challenge.
- So: Describe how the conflict was addressed.
- Then: Conclude with the resolution or outcome.
Example: Christopher Columbus wanted to find a new trade route to India because the current route was too dangerous, but he didn’t have the resources. So, he sought help from Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand. Then, he set sail and reached what would later become America.
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 (Generating Interaction between Schemata and Text)
GIST encourages students to create brief summaries as they read, focusing on the core message in 20 words or fewer. Here’s how to use GIST:
- Divide the text into 4-5 manageable sections.
- After reading each section, students summarize it in one sentence.
- After reading all sections, students combine their summaries to create a full overview of the text.
This strategy helps students focus on key points while reading longer, more complex texts.
Strategy #4 – Webbing
Webbing is a great visual summarization tool. It helps students map out the main ideas and supporting details. Here’s how you can incorporate it into summarizing:
- Center Bubble: Place the main idea in the center.
- Branching Bubbles: Add supporting details or categories that stem from the main idea.
Webbing also works with other semantic maps, such as:
- Timelines
- Venn diagrams
- Hierarchical organizers
These graphic organizers help students visually arrange information, making it easier to grasp and summarize.
Strategy #5 – Two-Column Notes
Two-column notes are a simple but effective way for students to outline text and organize their thoughts. To use this strategy:
- Fold the paper in half.
- In the left column, write headings or main ideas.
- In the right column, write supporting details for each heading.
This strategy works well for nonfiction texts, especially when students must organize and condense large amounts of information.
Strategy #6 – Jigsaw Reading
Jigsaw Reading transforms students into both learners and teachers. Here’s how it works:
- Divide a text into numbered sections.
- Group students by numbers (all #1s, all #2s, etc.) and have each group read and discuss their assigned section.
- After discussion, students return to new groups with one member from each section.
- Students take turns teaching their group about their section.
This cooperative learning strategy encourages students to summarize and explain information in their own words, deepening their comprehension.
Stem Questions for Summarizing
When students are practicing summaries, these questions can guide them:
- What is the main idea?
- How would you sum up the key points?
- What information is essential to understand the text?
- How can you explain this in your own words?
These prompts reinforce summarizing and encourage students to think critically about their reading.
Summarizing is a complex skill, but it can become a rewarding and enjoyable part of your literacy instruction with the right strategies. Combining these six strategies will give your students the tools to tackle complex texts and condense them into clear, concise summaries.
Be sure to check out the free printable resources below, designed to help your students practice these summarizing techniques!
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.
Visit all posts in the story element series.
