Summarizing: how to teach students what to keep and what to cut
In short
Summarizing means stating the most important ideas of a text briefly and in your own words. It differs from retelling, which recalls everything. Teach it with simple frames, like somebody, wanted, but, so for stories and main idea plus key details for nonfiction, then practice cutting summaries down.
What is the difference between retelling and summarizing?
A retelling tries to recall everything, usually in the order it happened. A summary picks out only what matters most and deliberately leaves the rest out. Young students start with retelling, which builds memory and story sense. Summarizing comes later, because it requires judging what's important.
That judgment is the hard part, and it takes most students a long time to get good at it. Many students write summaries that are really retellings, listing every event. Others pick out a vivid detail and miss the main point. Teaching summarizing is mostly teaching students to tell the difference between important and interesting.
Why does summarizing help comprehension?
Summarizing forces students to think about the whole text, decide what matters, and put it in their own words. Each of those steps deepens understanding. The National Reading Panel listed summarization among the strategies with research support, and it's one of the most useful study skills students carry into later grades.
Summaries also show you what students understood. A student who can't summarize a passage probably didn't understand its main idea, even if they can answer detail questions about it.
How do you teach summarizing stories?
A simple four-part frame helps: somebody, wanted, but, so. Somebody is the main character. Wanted is their goal. But is the problem that got in the way. So is how it worked out. A fifth part, then, can be added for the ending.
| Part | Question | Example for The Three Little Pigs |
|---|---|---|
| Somebody | Who is the main character? | Three little pigs |
| Wanted | What did they want? | wanted to build safe houses |
| But | What was the problem? | but a wolf blew down the straw and stick houses |
| So | What did they do about it? | so they all hid in the brick house |
| Then | How did it end? | then the wolf gave up |
Join the parts into one or two sentences, and you have a summary. Students quickly see how much of the story they left out, and they start to understand that leaving things out is the whole point of the exercise.
How do you teach summarizing nonfiction?
For nonfiction, teach main idea plus key details. Students find the topic, state the main idea about that topic in one sentence, then add two or three details that support it. Headings and first sentences often help them find the main idea.
- Read the passage and name the topic in a word or two.
- Ask what the writer is mostly saying about that topic.
- Write the main idea as one sentence.
- Pick two or three details that best support it.
- Cut anything that repeats or is just interesting.
- Teacher
- What's this paragraph mostly about?
- Student
- Bats.
- Teacher
- That's the topic. What is it saying about bats?
- Student
- That they help farmers.
- Teacher
- Good, that's the main idea. Which two details show how?
- Student
- They eat bugs that hurt crops, and they spread seeds.
How do you help students cut a summary down?
Give them a word limit, which sounds simple but changes the task completely. Asking for a summary in 20 words, or in one sentence, forces choices. Students learn to drop examples, combine ideas and replace lists with a general word, like "fruit" instead of "apples, pears and plums".
Model the cutting process aloud. Write a long summary, then cross out what isn't needed, explaining each choice. Students often find this the most useful part of the lesson, because they rarely see a writer revise.
When should summarizing be taught?
Retelling starts in kindergarten with read-alouds. Simple story summaries, like the somebody, wanted, but, so frame, fit first and second grade. Nonfiction summaries with main idea and details work from about third grade.
In upper grades, students can summarize longer texts, chapters and multiple sources. These are demanding tasks, so keep using frames and models longer than you think you need to.
How do you assess a summary?
Check three things: whether the main idea is there, whether the details chosen are important, and whether it's in the student's own words. Length matters too, and it's the quickest thing to spot. A summary that's almost as long as the original isn't a summary.
A simple scoring guide helps students see what you're looking for. Share it before they write and use it to give short, specific feedback afterward.
How does summarizing connect to writing?
Summarizing is a writing skill as much as a reading skill. Students who learn to state a main idea and support it with details use the same skills in their own paragraphs. Many teachers find that summary practice improves topic sentences across all student writing.
Short written summaries are also a useful routine after reading. Two or three sentences at the end of a lesson take a few minutes and show you who understood the text.
How do you support students who find summarizing hard?
Start with very short texts, a single paragraph or a short picture book, so the student only has a few ideas to choose from. Give them the frame on a card, and let them say the summary aloud before writing it, since talking first takes away the extra load of spelling and handwriting.
Another useful step is to give students three possible summaries of the same text and ask which one is best and why. Judging summaries is easier than writing them, and it teaches students what a good summary looks like before they have to produce one themselves.