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