Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Summarizing

In addition to the hustle and bustle that has been going on this past week, we've been focusing on our summarizing skills!

We discussed what summarizing was, and created a chart. :)
We explicitly talked about the different between a fiction and nonfiction summary.

We also talked a lot about how you need to include an ending, and that you don't want your summary to be too long-you want to hit on the highlights-not everything that happened. We decided 5-8 sentences was a good length! :)

First, we focused on a fiction summary.

I used the book How Many Days to America? (our mentor sentence book this week!), to show students how to write a fiction summary.
Then, I set them free on some picture books I pulled to have them write their own!
Some needed some redirection...

And some did awesome first time out...

Next up was how to write a nonfiction summary.

I used the Santa Maria article from an old Scholastic News.
Modeled it on the Elmo, discussing what I as doing as I did it-using the main idea, important words, supporting it we key details.
The students got a new Scholastic News to write a nonfiction summary on.

Another nice job!



Yes, I can see that they copied the first parts of my summary. I think that it is okay-I'm showing them how to write a good summary, and I want them to write a good summary.

They'll eventually bring their own voice into and have different beginnings. And since I'm giving them something similar to what I did and not exact, it'll be different enough anyway. :)

Our next step was to summarize something...non-traditional.

I brought back the Pixar shorts to help with this!

I specifically picked ones that we had seen before, to make the process a little easier.

I modeled how to do it with Partly Cloudy (after re-watching it, of course! ;)


Then we re-watched For the Birds and they wrote them summary.




For their work that day, I laid out Teaching with a Mountain View's Fiction Reading Skills Task Cards.

I told them to ignore the questions on them and to just write a summary :)

They did okay-we'll definitely need to continue to practice! Next, we'll add summarizing-both fiction and nonfiction to our notebooks.


Smiles and Sunshine,
Kaitlyn

1 comment:

  1. Summaries are so hard for the kids; they want to include every detail to retell the story. I love the idea of using the Pixar shorts! Thanks for great ideas! Your pictures made it very clear!

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