Teacher background

Comprehension Reading Strategy: Determining Importance
The Wisconsin Literacy Education and Reading Network Source offers background information and lesson plans on summarizing.

Determining Importance
These resources on determining importance are from the Madison Metropolitan School District.

Summarizing
This lesson from ReadingQuest.org: Making Sense in Social Studies includes tips on teaching summarizing, and an activity called "Sum it Up."

Manatee County Curriculum Kaleidoscope: Summarizing
This section from the school district's interactive benchmarks site provides simple summary sheets for 2nd graders for summarizing fiction and non-fiction. (temporarily broken link )

Student Activity Sites

Bio-Cube
Summarizing information is an important postreading and prewriting activity that helps students synthesize what they have learned. This tool allows students to develop an outline of a person whose biography or autobiography they have just read. Specific prompts ask students to describe a person's significance, background, and personality. The finished printout can be folded into a fun cube shape that can be used for future reference.
From Read-Write-Think, the International Reading Association

Story mapping tool
This interactive graphic organizer tool allows students to create a character map, conflict map, resolution map or setting map to print out. A print version of a story map is also available.

Fact Fragment Frenzy
This interactive tool helps young students practice finding what is important in what they read. Students drag important words from a passage to a blank page, to mimic note taking.

Choosing One Word: Summarizing Shel Silverstein's "Sick"
Students select what they believe to be the most important word in a text that they have read. They justify their choice and state the reasons that they think this particular word is the most important by using examples from the text.

Guided Comprehension: Summarizing Using the QuIP Strategy
Based on the Guided Comprehension Model developed by Maureen McLaughlin and Mary Beth Allen, this lesson introduces students to the comprehension strategy of summarizing. Students learn how to summarize information using the QuIP (questions into paragraphs) strategy, a technique that involves graphically organizing information and synthesizing it in writing.

Reading Informational Texts using the 3-2-1 Strategy
In this lesson, students in grades K-2 learn to use the 3-2-1 strategy, which involves writing about three things they discovered, two things they found interesting, and one question they still have.

Creative Response
After reading an informational selection, students creatively summarize the facts by writing and presenting the information in a campaign speech, newspaper article, editorial, TV news segment, mural, etc. This is one of several lesson plans using summarizing skills in science from the Journey North Web site. Others include:

Alpha Antics
Students reflect on what they have learned about animals and then begin listing words that summarize key ideas. Using the collected words they create a book called "AlphaAntics."

VIP's: Very Important Points
After reading a selection about animal adaptations, students create a bulleted list of the "Head-to-Toe" characteristics that help a species survive in the wild.

Native American Culture Across the US
This lesson asks K-2 students to compare and contrast how American Indians are represented in today's society with their actual customs, traditions, and way of life. It gives students the opportunity to use their summarizing skills in a social studies lesson.

Summarizing with Post-It Notes
This lesson plan for summarizing non-fiction in grades 3-5 was submitted to Education World.

Main Idea Lesson Plan
This is a simple lesson plan from the Omaha Public Schools focuses on how to find the main idea in expository text.