Four summarization ideas from the classroom of
Kelly Rubero:

Five complimentary resources from the NNWP's Reading in the Content Areas Guide:

During the 2006-2007 school year, I taught a 7th grade Reading Strategies class. One of the first things that I assigned was a summarization activity. As it turned out, my students thought that it was ok to just copy word for word what they had read. I ended up putting together an entire unit on how to summarize and take notes. I also talked with my students about the differences between summarizing, paraphrasing, and quoting. And I always started off my unit with a lesson or two on plagiarism.

Below are four of the short lessons that I used with my 7th graders to help them grasp the idea of summarizing. I also tied in other reading strategies as I went along with my planning. The REAP Strategy was given to my staff from one of our Instructional Coaches and it can be used with any level in any content area.

• Summarizing Teen Star Quotations Activity
• Three-part Paired Guided Reading & Practice with Summarization Activity
• Two-Column Note-Taking and Summarization Practice
• REAP Strategy Worksheet

The five free-to-use resources below come from the Northern Nevada Writing Project's 2006 Reading in the Content Areas Guide. If you like these resources and would like to order a copy of the RICA Guide in order to have access to many more excellent ideas, please visit the NNWP's publication page. All monies earned from the sale of this excellent guide go to fund further free-to-use developments here at the WritingFix website.

In Spring 2009, the Reading in the Content Areas Guide will be officially "retired," which means it will no longer be available for purchase.

Please enjoy and share the summary resources that come from this guide:

• The Concept Web -- Using a Concept Web allows students to create a visual map of the content of a reading selection. The web helps students organize the main ideas and details within the reading and see the relationships and hierarchy between the ideas and concepts.
• Summary Frames -- Summary frames are a series of questions that emphasize the important elements within a text pattern. Students answer the questions, then write summaries based on their responses.
• Key Concept Synthesis -- Struggling readers often have difficulty focusing on the key concepts within a text. Using the Key Concept Synthesis strategy helps students identify the important ideas as they read, use their own words to express the ideas, then explain why the ideas are important and make connections to other ideas.
• Power Thinking -- A variation of traditional outline formats, this strategy helps students take notes as they actively read the textbook, classify information, and understand main ideas and details. Students learn to apply Power Thinking as they read their textbooks in order to help sort the main ideas from details.
• Headings to Questions Guide -- The Headings to Questions Guide combines two reading and note-taking strategies, SQR3 and Cornell notes. Students work to create their own reading guide as they preview and question the text.

A Popular and Creative WritingFix Lesson that Requires Students to Summarize

Lesson TItle: Unlikely Diary Keepers
Lesson's Mentor Text: The Diary of a Worm by Doreen Cronin

Focus Trait/skill: Idea Development/putting research into one's own words

Lesson Summary: The writer will assume the role of a living creature (like an arthropod) or an abstraction (like a fraction) that they are learning about.  Writers will do research on the animal or abstraction they have chosen, learning new facts about these topics.  The writer will compose an imaginary 5- or 10-day diary, from the point-of-view of his/her researched role; each entry must contain a reference to a newly learned fact, and some entries should try to include humor (just as Doreen Cronin does in her book on earthworms).

(Click on the lesson title or book cover to access this summary assignment on-line.)

Seven complimentary resources from one of the NNWP's Writing Across the Curriculum Guide:

Original Wacky We-Search Reports, inspired by one of Nevada's favorite authors, Barry Lane

The seven free-to-use resources below come from the Northern Nevada Writing Project's 2006 Writing Across the Curriculum Guide. If you like these resources and would like to order a copy of the WAC Guide in order to have access to many more excellent ideas, please visit the NNWP's publication page. All monies earned from the sale of this excellent guide go to fund further free-to-use developments here at the WritingFix website.

In January of 2009, the Writing Across the Curriculum Guide will be officially "retired," which means it will no longer be available for purchase.

Please enjoy and share the summary resources that come from this guide:

• Summarize with a Traditional Haiku -- You can't really plagiarize a haiku from the encyclopedia or text book, can you? Teach this simple format to your students and have them create a single haiku or a series of haikus to show they can summarize information.
• Summarize with a Haiku Variation -- Here's a variation of the haiku format--instead of seventeen syllables, the writer uses seventeen words.
• Summarize with an Acrostic --You can't really plagiarize an acrostic poem from the encyclopedia or text book, can you? Teach this simple format to your students and have them create a single acrostic or a series of acrostics to show they can summarize information about vocabulary words.
• Summarize with the Alphabet Book Format -- An alphabet book makes a great group-writing summary assignment. Can you come up with 26 words or ideas (all beginning with different letters of the alphabet) that summarize a topic? Here's a worksheet to help students plan theirs.
• Summarize with a Research Recipe -- Here's a great summarizing assignment: translate research into the format of a recipe. What "ingredients" do you need to summarize a topic? What do you do with those ingredients to "cook up" your topic?
• Summarize with a Board Game--Version 1 -- This is another great group-writing task: have your students design a board game that summarizes their topic. Here's a template to help them design their board.
• Summarize with a Board Game--Version 2 -- Here's a second template for a board game, in case the first version doesn't appeal to your students.

In 2008, the Northern Nevada Writing Project and the Northern Nevada Teachers of American History Project co-sponsored a Saturday with Barry Lane. 120 Nevada teachers worked with Barry to explore his awesome book 51 Wacky We-Search Reports.

Barry's book does three excellent things: 1) it provides fifty-one writing formats for students to report out on information they've learned, and the formats make plagiarizing or regurgitation of facts close to impossible; 2) it encourages students to think with their funny bones, which immediately pushes their thinking to a higher level; 3) it encourages community among your students, as each of the fifty-one formats is a "we search" report, not an "I search" report.

In 2008, the Northern Nevada Writing Project began encouraging teachers who are already using this book to go one step further with it. The NNWP began encouraging teachers to invent and write-up original Wacky We-Search Reports. Below, we will post some of the best submissions from this new project.

• Our Template for Proposing a Wacky We-Search Report -- you will want to have a copy of Barry's original book to understand the sections of this template. If you are a teacher from outside of Northern Nevada who wants to propose an original Wacky We-Search Report, we will gladly look your report idea over. If we accept it and post it, we'll send you a copy of one of the NNWP's publications for your classroom. Send completed proposals to us at webmaster@writingfix.com.

Original Wacky We-Search Reports from WritingFix:

• The Wacky Smear Campaign -- originally featured in our Going Deep with Compare and Contrast Thinking Guide, this wacky report format asks students to imagine that any two things might run against each other in a wacky election. Students create campaign posters, print media, or radio ads that would discuss the opponent's weaknesses and reasons for not electing him/her/it. All good smear campaigns should end with the words, "I'm [insert name here], and I approve of this message."
• The Wacky "I Will Not" Chalkboard -- When you do something bad in school, the teacher might make you write “I will not [fill in offense here]” repeatedly on the chalkboard. Every episode of The Simpsons opens with Bart writing something different on the chalkboard at his school. Bart has done this so many times now that he could actually fill up an entire chalkboard with different “I will not” statements from his past. This writing activity has students create multiple “I will not” statements a person, place, or thing the class has studied.
• The Wacky "Box of Rocks" Assignment -- What if things we studied in school could all be packaged in boxes and containers that eventually found their ways to the shelves of grocery stores? Here, teacher Joni Martindale shares how she uses this wacky idea to have students show what they've learned about the different types of rocks and minerals. She invites you to borrow the writing assignment and use with other scientific or historical topics.
• The Wacky "Check out my Vacation" Story -- What stories could be interpreted if students spread out a series of cancelled checks to decipher where and when someone has gone? Here, teacher Kathy McCormick invites you to have fun interpreting fake check stories, writing a vacation summary in the form of fake cancelled checks, then creating imaginary reports that summarize other information in the form of fake cancelled checks.
• The Wacky Advertisement (with Disclaimers) Activity -- What could we learn if we really looked closely at (or listened closely to) an advertisement's disclaimers? Here, teacher Stephanie Kveum invites you to have fun writing a simple, creative advertisement for something your class has studied, and then write a long series of disclaimers that should accompany the ad.