Reading & ELA

5 Powerful Strategies to Summarize Texts in Upper Elementary Teaching

Why should we teach summarizing text in upper elementary education? It’s a crucial skill to have for numerous reasons. It plays a pivotal role in reading comprehension skills, critical thinking skills, and communication skills. Let’s find out more about how to summarize texts in meaningful ways. Continue reading!

Why Summarization is Important

Learning to condense information into a brief summary helps students come up with key ideas. It also helps them establish important details in a text compared to irrelevant ones. Once they have broken things down into key ideas and important details, they can better comprehend complex texts.

Summarization empowers students to take the main ideas and key themes from any text placed in front of them. This includes narratives, informational texts, and other academic content. Once they master this skill, they can navigate through tons of information and retain the important parts. This is especially important in today’s information-rich society.

Summarizing text also nurtures critical thinking skills by encouraging students to analyze, evaluate, and synthesize the information in front of them. They are forced to examine the relationships between different ideas and identify the significance and relevance of each part. Students then learn to form connections, draw conclusions, and make informed judgments about the material they read.

Communication skills are also enhanced when students learn to summarize texts. It equips them with the ability to convey a large piece of text in a coherent and shorter manner. As students progress through their academic journey, they are required to summarize texts for assignments, presentations, discussions, and more.

All in all, learning to summarize texts fosters a range of essential skills, from reading comprehension to critical thinking to communication. By helping students master the skill of summarizing text, teachers will open doors for main ideas and smaller pieces of information. Students will become more effective learners, thinkers, and communicators. This will, in turn, help them in the academic and real world!

5 Powerful Ways to Summarize Texts

Here is a brief list of ways you can help your students learn to summarize texts in the classroom.

Main Idea Mapping: Teach students to create visual representations of the main idea and supporting details by using graphic organizers such as concept maps or flowcharts. This strategy helps them identify the key elements of a text and their relationships, facilitating the summarization process.
Highlight and Reduce: Encourage students to highlight or underline the most important information in a text, then challenge them to condense it into a concise written summary. By focusing on key details and eliminating unnecessary information, they develop the skill of distilling complex texts into manageable summaries.
Who, What, When, Where, Why, How: Teach students to ask themselves these key questions when summarizing a text. By answering these questions, they can extract the essential information and capture the core meaning of the text.
Sentence Stems: Provide students with a set of sentence stems or starter phrases that guide them in summarizing different types of texts. Examples include “In summary, the main idea is…” or “The text discusses…”. These prompts serve as scaffolds to support students in constructing concise summaries.
Retell and Synthesize: Encourage students to retell the text in their own words, focusing on the main ideas and key details. Then, challenge them to synthesize the information from multiple sources or texts, summarizing the common themes or connections between them. This strategy enhances their comprehension and critical thinking skills.

By implementing these five powerful strategies, upper elementary students will gain the necessary tools to effectively summarize texts, enabling them to improve their reading comprehension, critical thinking, and communication skills.

Be sure to try out my Graphic Organizers for summarizing text. They are great for vocabulary and all things literacy. Use them in centers or small groups or introduce them during whole group lessons. Students will appreciate a place to organize their thoughts as they read new texts.