How To Teach Summarizing to Students: 13 Tips to Try
Summarizing is a tricky skill for students to learn. They have to switch from retelling a story in its entirety to sharing just the most important information. Repeated practice can be key when considering how to teach summarizing. We have a list of 13 tips that you can incorporate into your lessons to allow students to summarize content at multiple points throughout a lesson.
13 tips to teach summarizing to students
You can use multiple strategies to teach summarizing on one text or try a new method for each new text your students read. Explore these tips to help you teach and practice summarizing with your students:
1. Create opportunities for students to do multiple readings
The more familiar you are with a text, the easier it is to summarize. One way to ensure students become familiar with their texts is to have them reread to build deeper comprehension. Have your students reread texts with a different purpose each time. For example, you may have them:
Skim the text to identify the topic or main idea.
Read and highlight information that supports the topic or main idea.
Reread to find and define unfamiliar vocabulary words.
Newsela’s products offer AI-powered checks for understanding embedded throughout informational and news texts. They encourage close reading each time a student interacts with a text by getting them to slow down and focus on the main ideas and key details to fully understand what they read.
2. Teach narrative text structure
You can teach students how to identify narrative text structure before you teach them how to summarize. Narrative text structure appears most often in fictional stories with clear beginnings, middles, and endings. A story with this structure has clear stopping points to pause, summarize, and check for understanding. It’s also a text structure even your youngest students are likely familiar with before they enter your classroom.
Teaching narrative text structure helps students break down texts into smaller chunks—an important tool for summarizing. Some questions you may ask when reading a narrative story include:
Who are the main characters?
What is the setting or context?
What happened at the beginning/middle/end of the story?
What problems are the main characters trying to solve?
What do the main characters think or feel about this problem?
Learning about narrative text structure also helps students with their organizational skills. It teaches them how to organize and explain their thoughts chronologically. To make the concept stick, you can use our plot diagram graphic organizer and explainer videos.
3. Introduce and reinforce relevant key terms
The main idea and key details are two important vocabulary words students should know when learning to summarize. The main idea is a one-sentence summary of the point of the text. Key details are the important facts and opinions that explain or support the main idea. Finding the main idea and key details are often taught as their own skills, before you introduce summarizing.
It’s important to use these key terms while teaching summarizing, and reminding students of their definitions. Though these are their own literacy skills, students can—and should—practice all three together. When teaching summarizing, you can ask questions like:
What is the main idea of this text?
What key details did the author include to support the main idea?
Are there any unnecessary details included for more information?
Newsela ELA’s explainer videos and our updated Standards and Skills collection provide the resources you need to teach and reinforce these concepts to make them stick for students.
4. Change your questions
Teaching relevant vocabulary and definitions is important, but sometimes, students need a different approach. Try rewording your questions to make students think more selectively about the information they share in a summary.
Rather than saying, “Summarize this paragraph,” you may ask questions like:
What happened to the main character in this chapter?
What do you think the author wants us to remember about this paragraph?
You’re still asking students to summarize by rephrasing the question, but you can get more specific about the information you want them to share. This can help them create future summaries independently because you’ve already prompted them on what types of information to look for in a text.
5. Teach the 5Ws (and 1H)
Summarizing pulls out the most important information from the text, and that information usually answers these six questions:
Who?
What?
When?
Where?
Why?
How?
You can use our summarizing worksheet to help students record this information for any text. This strategy may work best for nonfiction and informational texts, though students can also use these questions to summarize fictional works. Let’s look at how this strategy works with the article “Time Machine (1892): The first immigrants arrive at Ellis Island” from our ELA Resources for Independence Day collection.
After reading the article, students can pull out the details that answer each question. Their responses may look something like this:
Who: Annie Moore (Irish Immigrant)
What: Processing people at the immigration station
When: January 1, 1892
Where: Ellis Island
Why: To welcome immigrants from two ships through the port and into the new immigration station
How: By processing people through 10 aisles with registry clerks, detaining those with illnesses, and sending others to the right buildings to get where they’re going.
With this information, students have all the details they need to write a summary. An example summary may look like this:
Annie Moore, an Irish immigrant, was the first person processed through the Ellis Island immigration stations on January 1, 1892. The new station opened to welcome immigrants from two boats through the port, process them through 10 aisles, detain those with illnesses, and send others to the right buildings to find where they’re going next.
6. Use the “Somebody wanted but so then” scaffold
This strategy is similar to the 5Ws and 1H method that gets students thinking about the most important parts of a story. The difference between the two is that by answering each part of this prompt, students have an almost complete sentence to use as their summary. In the 5Ws and 1H strategy, they only have the building blocks to write their own sentences. The five prompts students complete include:
Somebody: Who is the main character or narrator of the text?
Wanted: What did that somebody want to do?
But: What was the problem?
So: How did that somebody solve the problem?
Then: What was the conclusion of the story?
Let’s look at how this strategy may help students summarize Aesop’s Fable, “The City Mouse and the Country Mouse,” from our K-2 ELA collection. After students read the fable, they may answer each prompt like this:
Somebody: Country Mouse and City Mouse
Wanted: To have a meal together
But: City Mouse thought Country Mouse didn’t have fancy enough food
So: They went back to the city to eat rich mouse food and had to hide from the cat and dog
Then: Country Mouse decided to go home and eat in peace
You can then teach students how to split this information into a few simpler sentences for a summary that looks like this:
Country Mouse and City Mouse wanted to have a meal together. But City Mouse thought Country Mouse didn’t have fancy enough food. So they went back to the city to eat rich mouse food and had to hide from the cat and dog. Then, Country Mouse decided to go home and eat in peace.
New to Newsela?
Sign up for Newsela Lite to practice skills and build a literacy routine that students love—for free!
7. Use selective underlining and annotations
Annotating and selective underlining are ways students can take notes while reading a text. Either strategy encourages students to highlight or underline key terms, facts, people, and events. This strategy may be tricky for students at first. They’ll often start by highlighting or underlining too much information or not enough. Modeling how to annotate texts correctly can help.
Using the 5Ws and 1H as a guide helps, too. When students know specific information to look for or highlight, it can cut down on extraneous markings. In addition to highlighting important information, you may also teach students to cross out extraneous details (in pencil in case they make a mistake!).
Newsela ELA’s annotation feature supports this type of highlighting for both teachers and students. You can model how to annotate selectively and highlight the most important text information. Then, students can use the feature independently while reading to help them summarize the content.
8. Give a non-example
To help students recognize a good summary, you can compare it with a bad one. For example, you may create two summaries for a text. One should purposely have extraneous information or be too long or confusing.
You can project both summaries for the whole class to see during group instruction. Or you can share copies of both summaries with students one-to-one. After reading and reviewing both, have students discuss which summary is better and why.
9. Revise summaries
Another strategy to help the concept stick is to have students revise their own summaries. Have students read a text three times to write an initial summary and revise it twice.
Ask students to write a summary after the first reading. It may be long and contain more information than necessary. After the second reading, ask students to cut their summaries by two sentences. With more exposure to the text, they may locate and remove extraneous details.
After the final reading, ask them to reduce their summaries to one to three sentences. With this last push, they should be able to reduce the summary to just the most important information. If students have difficulty cutting sentences, do a refresher lesson on key details to help them decide what to keep and what to erase.
10. Put a price on each word
Pat Widdowson of Surrey County Schools in North Carolina shared this activity with Raymond Jones of ReadingQuest. Give students a spending limit when writing their summaries. For example, tell students they can spend $20 on each summary and that each word costs $1. This means their summary can’t be more than 20 words, and they’ll have to get creative to create one under that limit.
You can adjust all the factors in this activity to make it easier or more challenging. For example, you may increase or decrease the cost of each word or the amount students have to spend. Adjusting the parameters can help you scaffold the skill and gradually teach students how to create shorter summaries.
11. Summarize more than texts
Though we teach this skill in ELA classrooms, students can summarize nearly any information. It’s not something confined to written texts. Other things students can summarize include:
Speeches
Lectures
Digital media, like TV episodes or movies
Plays
Songs
If students just aren’t “getting it” when summarizing a text, try taking the skill off the page. Show them an old (student-appropriate!) commercial, TV clip, or Newsela interactive video. Ask them to summarize what they see and hear.
After students create their summaries, talk about how they chose which information to include. Use this as an opportunity to show them the same techniques they used to find the key information in visual media also apply to finding it when they’re reading.
12. Try illustrated summaries
For early readers still learning how to write, you can try asking them to create illustrated summaries to practice the skill. Illustrated summaries still include information from the 5Ws and 1H but show that information in pictures instead of words.
Have students draw the story's main character, setting, problem, and other important details. Then, they can narrate their visual summary aloud to the class, a peer group, or one-on-one with another student. You can also guide their oral summaries by introducing the “Somebody wanted but so then” framework.
13. Model, model, model
Constant modeling is one of the best techniques you can use to teach students how to summarize. You can incorporate summary modeling into any lesson or subject.
After you read a text as a class, model how to find the main idea. Show students how to separate key details from extraneous information. Teach them to do things like underlining, highlighting, or taking notes while reading a passage. The more you can show students how to do the skill, the easier it becomes for them to replicate your strategies for themselves.
Modeling also includes showing examples of summaries in the texts students read. Some examples include:
In textbooks, at the beginning or end of a new chapter.
On the backs or inside covers of books in your classroom or school library.
Teach summarizing with Newsela
With over 15,000 texts across 20+ genres, Newsela’s products provide all the content you could ever need to teach your students about summarizing. With Newsela ELA, you can improve reading comprehension and summarizing by strengthening key literacy skills like finding the main idea and locating key details.
With Newsela Social Studies and Newsela Science, you can use even more texts and scaffolds to practice summarizing texts across subjects outside of ELA. Not a Newsela customer yet? You can experience all the content and skill-building activities our products have to offer by signing up for Newsela Lite for your classroom today.