Curated OER
What's the Main Idea?
Fourth graders comprehend what they are reading. An effective strategy for comprehension is summarization. They single out and explaining the main ideas of a passage. Students find a sentence or rewrite their own that covers...
Curated OER
What's the Main Idea?
Young scholars summarize a piece of text. After reviewing the correct way to read and summarize, students work in groups to summarize a piece of text assigned by the instructor. They write a summary paragraph using the process outlined...
Curated OER
Practice Paraphrasing
Help your high schoolers identify the main idea of a passage with this instructional activity on paraphrasing. First rewriting a paragraph in their own words, they then underline the most important words in their paraphrase and use them...
Baruch College Writing Center
Summarizing, Paraphrasing, and Quoting Workshop
What's the difference between summarizing and paraphrasing? Show class members how to find the main ideas from informational text and condense it, restate it, or quote it directly with a series of educational activities based on two...
Curated OER
Using Wordless Comics To Help Create Meaning in Reading
Use picture cues as a tool in order to create meaning along with text. With a wordless comic, young illustrators discuss the main idea and character traits, and independently write a summary for a page of a wordless comic. This strategy...
Curated OER
Short and Sweet Science
Readers learn how to summarize scientific text and evaluate the advantages, disadvantages, and challenges in writing summaries. They select science-related articles you've pulled and collected from the New York Times and, with a partner,...
Curated OER
Let's Summarize!
Students, after brainstorming what summarization is, practice the strategy of summarization to help pick out the important parts of text each time they read. They read and summarize the article, "10 Cool Things About Dolphins," from the...
Curated OER
Lesson 8: Summarizing Information
In this summarizing information worksheet, students read a featured article, summarize the article, identify the story's five W's and one H, and identify appropriate relevant facts.
Polk Bros Foundation
I Can Analyze a Story or History Completely and Carefully
Start off analysis of a text with a instructional activity that asks pupils to complete several tasks. Class members note down a couple of characters or people and their distinguishing traits, describe the most important event, summarize...
Curated OER
Mapping Out the Story
Discuss the reading comprehension strategy of summarization with your elementary schoolers! They read a chapter from their social studies textbook, Regions Near and Far, and create a map, or word web, for the chapter. They identify...
Curated OER
Anticipation Guides Improve Reading Comprehension
Beginning with anticipation guide strategies is a powerful method for improving reading comprehension. First, list initial ideas for a topic the class will be reading about. These ideas are formulated into statements, some of which are...
Curated OER
Staying in Phoenix
Read to learn! Here is a one-page informational passage about inhabitants of Phoenix, Arizona. Learners will read to make logical inferences and determine the central idea or theme. Prompts ask the class to identify the main idea and...
Curated OER
Let's Find the Main Ideas!
Third graders examine how finding the main ideas and summarizing increases their reading comprehension. They read "The Sea in Danger" while applying the six rules of summarization in a modeled lesson. Next, working in small groups, they...
Curated OER
Get the Skinny! Summarize a Story!
Learners examine the steps of summarizing text. They silently read an article, then read and discuss the steps to summarizing a passage. Students then write a summary of the article they read, and as a class discuss the main idea,...
Curated OER
Organizing Main Ideas and Supporting Details
Students read given information and identify the main ideas and specific detail of the story. In groups, they read a historical title and create a "book talk" for each one, summarizing the story. In addition, students create a...
Curriculum Corner
Informational Text Graphic Organizers
Scholars delve into an informational text with the help of four pages that focus on the author's purpose, vocabulary words, summarization, and main idea.
Curated OER
Super Summarizers
Students examine the process of summarization by creating an event map. They discuss the process of summarizing text, then silently read an article from "Time For Kids" magazine. Students observe the teacher create a map for the...
Curated OER
Summarize and Celebrate Earth Day!
Young scholars observe and demonstrate the process of summarizing text. As a class they read and discuss a poster of the rules for summarization, then silently a page from the book "Let's Celebrate Earth Day." Students then summarize...
Curated OER
Summary, Note Taking, Main Idea and Details
Young scholars take notes from oral readings and lectures to create a summary of the material. They use different sizes of post-it notes to complete the activity. They practice pulling the main ideas out of the given material.
Curated OER
Face to Face Summary!
Students, while in the computer lab visiting the National Geographic Kids website, fill out a checklist of unimportant/redundant information, look for important events and ideas and search for the author's main idea and supporting...
EngageNY
Writing a Summary: “Middle Ages” Excerpt 2
What is the big idea? Scholars use Middle Ages Excerpt 2 to complete a summary graphic organizer. They then use the information from the organizer to write a summary of the text on lined paper. Learners share summaries with the class.
Curated OER
Researching the Past
Learners research the western movement in order to learn note taking strategies with nonfiction texts. They use the Internet to search for important information about the western movement using the Cornell Notes note-taking system. They...
Curated OER
The Newspaper Article
Have your class participate in an interview activity using an informational text about the Amazon. After reading a Cultural Connections story about a person from the Amazon, middle schoolers write interview questions based on the text....
Curated OER
“The Story of an Hour” Extension Activities: Teacher’s Guide and Notes
Enhance and extend instruction of "The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin with one or all of these ideas. You might want to cover characterization and summary, or improve understanding of context clues and irony. You can cover any...