Teaching students to summarize what they read should not be a difficult task to accomplish. This is not a lesson to be taught in one day, either, and should be revisited with each text that the student reads. Ensuring that students know how to effectively summarize what they read will help improve reading comprehension and subsequently improve student grades.
Start with Short Summaries for Young Kids
When teaching young children how to summarize what they read, start with small expectations. Read a paragraph to them and ask them to tell you the main idea of the passage. Have them read something short and tell you what the main idea is. Once students are able to tell you the main idea of a short paragraph, work on extending both the length of the passage as well as the amount of information required in the summary. Go from a one sentence summary (naming the main idea) to a two or three sentence summary, explaining several main ideas found in the text.
Use Age Appropriate Text for Older Kids
Older students who struggle to summarize a passage should be taught this skill with simple, age-appropriate texts. Choosing a newspaper article or magazine article may be more appropriate for them to read than a leveled book from your library as these books tend to be too childish for older students. Finding age appropriate texts may be a difficult task, but it will make it much easier to encourage your struggling students to learn to summarize or recap what they have read.
Ideas for Teaching Students to Summarize
When teaching the skill of summarizing, keep it fun, and focus on the task of comprehending what is being read. Stop frequently throughout the reading of a text to ask the students to tell you what is going on, what has already happened and what they think will happen next. As you continue to read and ask basic comprehension questions, your students will improve their comprehension and summarizing abilities at the same time.
Require written summaries when appropriate as well. This will not only reinforce the skill of recapping what they read, but will help to improve their writing skills. It can be very difficult for some students to transfer their thoughts into written form, so be sure to provide as much support and practice as possible.
Revisiting the skill of summarizing again and again will help your students become more active participants while reading. They will comprehend more of what they read and become better skilled at writing and forming their thoughts.
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