The 2014 National Curriculum demands in Yr5 and 6 that children learn to summarise. I have for sometime wondered about the need for this but understand that it is a skill often used in academia amongst other places. I have always thought of it more in terms of reading, used to demonstrate understanding of the key ideas or concepts.
As we have been demonstrating and talking about Reciprocal Reading much more recently, I have investigated summarising in more detail in order that we can develop more activities based around it. Much to my delight, it has also meant buying many more children’s books as there is a rich seam of summaries of classics, in particular, out there. The steps to summarising are:
- read and understand the text
- identify the main points and key ideas
- create your own sentence/sentences to express the information in their own words
Three steps which look quite small but require a lot of readers.
This is actually the crux of the matter in reading. The skills or strategies that we can use to help us understand the text are clarifying and questioning. Clarifying identifies the parts of the text that are ‘reluctant to yield their meaning’ (Doug Lemov in Reconsidering Reading). Children use the clues in the text along with re-reading, reading on and going back and re-reading slowly to problem-solve and debug the issue. Questioning where the children generate their own questions helps to identify key bits of information that could be included in a summary.
This can be really challenging for children but there are some things that we can teach them. Firstly, delete trivial information or redundant information or that which is not necessary by actually crossing it out. This will leave what is deemed important.
Teach children how to use superordinates and/or paraphrasing. Superordinates can be used for lists, e.g dogs, cats and goldfish can be referred to as pets. Paraphrasing refers to the skill of taking some words and using synonyms or other words to refer to key ideas or events. Children can do this by circling words and phrases in the text and then labelling them with a synonyms or putting the ideas into their own words (fewer).
A topic sentence can be identified to support a summary. Not all paragraphs have one so where one is not available, creation of one is a key strategy. This is taught in writing in Yr3 and 4. It is almost impossible to create them in writing if they have not been studied in reading. They are often more visible in non-fiction and so this might be the first place to find them when teaching and then move into narrative.
Now pull together all the words/phrases/ideas and put them into your own words. Another form of paraphrasing.
These summaries can the be presented in a variety of ways. I have found the following books really useful as models of summaries.
Classics Unfolded are a fantastic model of summarising. They are based on much longer novels and you wouldn’t start with these but they include a paraphrased couple of sentences for each significant event. Each page has a quote to back up the paraphrasing and an image that an illustrator has created around the text. For children the classics are The Secret Garden and Alice in Wonderland. Children could however, create one of these for any novel you read in guided or independent sessions.
This book is a follow-up to the very successful Short by Kevin Crossley-Holland. The story in this book that I am most interested in is ‘In Your Dreams’. In this story, most words have been deleted apart from the nouns. Try this on another text to see if it really does yield the main points or key ideas.
These books both work in the same way with just individual words to sum up parts of the story. These are from Cozy Classics including the Star Wars series from the same company. They are 12 worded, felt classics! Which do you think the following story is?
But perhaps the best and the most random is the babylit counting books.
These just make me laugh! Who could resist Les Mis for toddlers?
Have you taught summarising? How did you do it?