Summarising
This skill is about students being able to recognise the important information in a text and summarise it in fewer words.
ACTIVITIES TO HELP STUDENTS SUMMARISE
One way to model to your students how to summarise (NSW Centre for Effective Reading, n.d.):
(Winch et al., 2014)
- focusing attention on key facts/events and not minor details.
- summaries should be text based and avoid opinion and prior knowledge.
ACTIVITIES TO HELP STUDENTS SUMMARISE
- teach students to use content and index to narrow their search for information.
- use headings and subheadings to get an understanding for what particular sections might focus on.
- retelling, rewriting and drawing significant information from a text.
- Task cards
- these can be teacher generated or sourced from the internet, containing passages of writing.
- students can be challenged to summarise them in 30 words or less, or 12 words or less for a smaller passage.
One way to model to your students how to summarise (NSW Centre for Effective Reading, n.d.):
- Use a short segment of a popular movie, or a text as a stimulus.
- Explain to students that you will be showing them several different summaries of the same scene/text and be getting them to pick the best one (reminding them that good summaries are short and include the main points).
- Show them several summaries (including both correct and incorrect examples of summaries).
- Discuss each of the summaries, emphasising the reason why the incorrect examples are not good summaries.
(Winch et al., 2014)