Lesson 8: Summarizing Information

If you're looking to set your class up for writing effective arguments, try out this idea. While originally created with freedom as a guiding idea, the activity could easily be adapted for other themes. As a class, create a chart of...

The Cay has been criticized by groups such as the Council on Interracial Books for Children because of the way race is portrayed. Explore the argument against the book while taking the author's perspective into account. Class members...

Focus on plot and the impact-specific events in The Cay. Class members use their double-entry journals, created in a previous lesson in this series, to record their thinking about the guiding question as they read chapters 15 through 17....

Help learners find the most important information in a text with a lesson on summarizing. As kids read through a passage about Johannes Gutenberg, they summarize small excerpts, put events in sequential order, and respond to two longer...

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...

Everything you need to know about informational text features can be found in this resource. Recognizing these types of text features and how they are used in text allows readers to better understand information. Teachers can use this as...

The effect of cultural beliefs on the progress and industrialization of a society is an interesting idea to consider, and this is certainly true in this lesson on feudal Japan. Your young historians will read informational texts on...

Sputnik was one of the greatest scientific advancements of the 1950s, and this reading instructional activity does it justice. Pupils start off with pre-reading questions and a video. They then read an excerpt from an article, which is...

In lesson 13 of this unit on colonial trade, young researchers learn about apprentices as they prepare to write help-wanted ads for the specific trade they have been researching. To begin, the class listens closely as the teacher reads...

"Who says a pen has to be called a pen? Why not call it a frindle?" Inspired by this quote from the award-winning novel written by Andrew Celements, this lesson allows children to invent their own terms for common classroom objects,...