Ready, Set, SUMMARIZE!

Book reports, critiques and other responses to literature are fixtures in most language arts curricula. Teachers use them to assess a student’s understanding and analysis of their reading.  One key element in most of these assignments is the summary of the text, so it’s important that your student learn to summarize.  Here’s one method that can help.

Start by having your student summarize smaller pieces of writing.  Try a paragraph or even a single long sentence.  Challenge your student to find key words in sentences, or distill the paragraph into one or two sentences that contain the most important ideas.  This takes practice, so don’t be discouraged if the first attempts are off-base.

Once your student has the knack of summarizing paragraphs, you’re ready to work on a book.  Read a section.  This could be a paragraph, a page, or a chapter.  Have your student write down a specific number of important events or bits of information learned from that assigned section.  Check his or her work to see if you agree.  With practice, your student will learn to restate entire books in one or two paragraphs, and summaries will almost seem to write themselves!