Whew! Summer is over, and with that comes the end of my summer series on Reading Strategies for Children! Yep, this is the last one in that series. Not gonna lie, I was ready to call it quits multiple times throughout the summer. Not only do these posts force me to dig into my brain and try to sound like I know what I’m talking about… but I also lost a lot of subscribers in the process :(. I guess that’s what happens when you don’t follow the bloggy rules and write about lots of different topics (like education AND parenting AND food AND marriage) rather than focusing on just one topic.
Anyway, thanks for sticking with me, even if you don’t have kids and/or aren’t interested in this series! It means a lot to me that you’re still here and you’re reading :D. This series is the kind of resource I would have loved to share with parents when I was still in the classroom, so at least I can do that now! Please let me know if you’ve found it helpful!
Now, onto the last reading strategy: summarizing and synthesizing!
Reading Strategy: Summarize
This may be the reading strategy that you feel most comfortable with. While you may not have heard about “text-to-text connections” much in your elementary school days, I’m fairly certain all of us are familiar with the idea of summaries from our own schooling. Whether it was reading a book and summarizing it for a book report, or reading summaries at the end of textbook chapters, summaries were and are a basic part of producing and consuming text. However, writing a good summary requires a lot more skill than we might think.
I used to think summaries were simple work… until I started teaching. Students would turn in summaries that were not really summaries at all. Sometimes, the summary felt longer than reading the actual text that they were supposed to summarize! Somewhere in their schooling, students picked up the idea that “the more you write, the better.” So I students would proudly hand in their 1.5 to 2 page “summaries” of a one page story we had just read. It would be filled with detail and sometimes even dialogue- excellent for story-writing, but not for a summary!
Other students would hand in something short that just listed a few random events that took place. It was as if they just pulled out details they remembered and threw them down into print. There was no distinction between key events and minor details– as long as they wrote down something they remembered from the text, they were happy to call it a summary.
Of course, neither of these reflected good thinking skills in terms of summarizing information. Here is one way you can try to help your child grow in the area of summarizing more effectively.
Teaching Summaries
Growing up, I remember being taught that a summary simply consisted of listing the 4W’s (and an H): who, what, where, when, how. Nowadays, I don’t think that quite covers it, though. Take the story of The Three Little Pigs:
There were three pigs and a bad wolf. The wolf blew down their houses. It happened at their homes. It happened in the day time. He blew really hard.
Technically, I covered all my bases, right? Who… what… where… when… how. But that still doesn’t quite feel right, does it? But if you simply ask a child to do the 4w’s + H, there will be many who give you a summary that looks just like that. At the elementary level, when we are still mostly focusing on summarizing stories, I’ve often found The 5-Finger Retell to be a handy tool for students who need more structure and guidance: Tell your child, “You can use your hands to remind you of all the important parts you should include in a story summary.”
- “Start with your thumb.” Point to yourself with your thumb. “WHO are the main characters in the story? You don’t have to list every character– just the important ones!”
- “Then answer this: WHERE does the story take place?” Extend your arm and point outward, moving it horizontally as if there were a big landscape you were pointing at.
- “Next is the middle finger, which is a problem…” some kids may immediately see a connection between a middle finger and a problem… but hopefully most are more innocent and have no idea how a middle finger could be a “problem finger,” so you can bend your middle finger downwards and tell them this:
- “Next is my ring finger. My wedding day was a SIGNIFICANT EVENT in my life, and this ring is a symbol of my marriage. So use your ring finger to remind you to list any other significant events in the story!”
- “Now we’ve reached the end. If you put your pinky and thumb together, you make a full circle, and when things come “full circle,” it means they’ve come to an end. Share how the story ends.”
(I know the drawing looks like it’s my pointer finger, but really, it’s a pinky!! These hand drawings were hard for me 😛 ).
It’s not a perfect tool, but it’s a great start. I’ve been using it ever since Dr. Shierling introduced it to us in my teacher training days, and it has always produced better summaries than the 4W+H method. For example, with The Three Little Pigs, we end up with something more cohesive:
(1) There were three pigs and a bad wolf. (2) The pigs were in their homes. (3) The problem was that the wolf wanted to blow down their houses and eat up the pigs. (4) He blew down the first home made of straw and ate the pig. Then he blew down the second home made of sticks and ate the pig. He could not blow down the third home made of bricks. (5) In the end, he went down the chimney of the brick house and landed in a pot of hot water and died.
(Yeah, I went with the traditional story. Ewch.) But really, doesn’t that flow so much better? The 5-Finger Retell is a good balance between providing a rigid tool and also encouraging some more independent thinking with the open-ended “significant events” category.
Teaching students to summarize expository text is a completely different thing. It requires good filtering skills, which means more practice with determining importance. Continue working with your child on pulling out the important information to work towards effective informational summaries that way!
Conclusion
Some reading strategies are much more straightforward and easy to talk about than others. You will probably find your child excited and eager to make predictions, and quick to make text-to-self connections, but many children will hit a wall when it comes to filtering information to determine what is important and summarize what they’ve read. All of these strategies build on each other and support each other, though, so continue to work on all of them, going more and more in depth each time!
I hope you got some great reading time in with your child this summer, or that you’re inspired to cozy up on the couch and spend some quality time together with your child and a book as the school year begins. Even if your child is a stellar reading, reading together is a great way to experience new adventures and bond together, and your child will likely cherish the attention and time spent together! I’m sure her teacher will be happy to know you are encouraging your child’s literacy in this way, too! :). Hope you have all gotten a good start to the school year and that your child has a great year digging his nose into books!
A summarized version for you to pin :).
Sources:
“Summarizing and Synthesizing: What’s the Difference? — Climate Change and the Polar Regions — Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears.” Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears Summarizing and Synthesizing Whats the Difference Comments. N.p., n.d. Web. 04 Sept. 2015. <https://beyondpenguins.ehe.osu.edu/issue/climate-change-and-the-polar-regions/summarizing-and-synthesizing-whats-the-difference>.
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Related Posts
1. Why Your Child Hates Reading (and How to Change That)
4. Reading Strategy: Monitor Comprehension
5. Reading Strategy: Activate Background Knowledge
6. Reading Strategy: Make Connections
7. Reading Strategy: Ask Questions
8. Reading Strategy: Infer Meaning
9. Reading Strategy: Determine Importance
7 responses to “Reading Strategy: Summarize”
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I think this series was great! (I am an elementary school teacher.) I plan to direct my parents to your blog to read this series. I think it could help a lot of my students! Thanks for all the time and effort you put into writing it.
This is a great method! I like how it’s easy to remember what “thing” goes with which finger. Too often I find methods like this tend to be confusing and not much easier! 🙂
I LOVED this series. I’m in college and I think the techniques you share are great. It’s a shame you lost subscribers. Keep up the good work.
Thank you for this series!!! I wanted more! Every post was so useful that I’ll definitely be using in my future teaching 🙂
Yayyyyy!! I’m so happy to hear that! Thank you for the encouraging feedback!!
Hello from the future! This series of posts was a tremendous help to me (I’m a parent of a 5th-grader who always says she hates reading). I can’t wait to do guided reading with her. Your posts were super informative and well-presented. Thank you so much!
Mireille, thank you so much for taking the time to share that with me! This made my day! =D Hope you have meaningful reading time together and we can turn that reluctance around!