Nonfiction Summaries!

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I was working with my third graders on fiction summaries. I am very pleased to say that they have made a lot of progress! Unfortunately, that is only half the battle. Now, we must master nonfiction summaries, too! Does it ever end?!

We used the same anchor chart, but focused on the nonfiction side. A nonfiction summary focuses on the main idea and supporting details. Finding the main idea can definitely be tricky. The only way to get better is through lots and lots of practice!

For the first book, students analyzed my model of a nonfiction summary. Since the checklist worked so well for fiction, I made one for nonfiction, too! Students used crayons to mark up my summary. When they found something from the checklist in my summary, they either underlined or circled it and checked it off.

We wrote the second summary together through guided practice. Once again, we used the checklist to analyze and mark up the summary when we were finished. 

For the final summary, students wrote the summary independently. They self-assessed their own summary using the checklist, then they traded with a partner. The partner then used the checklist to grade their summary. I love how the checklist allows students to be more independent. They can just reference the checklist instead of asking me for help. The constant assessing of my work, their own work, and other students' work provided constant repetition and reinforcement of the elements of a good nonfiction summary. We will continue to practice, and hopefully students will retain this information!

If you would like your own copy of the checklist, click here.

Do you use checklists in your classroom?

Nonfiction Summary

Our state test places a large emphasis on the difference between the structure of a summary for fiction and nonfiction texts. As a result, I developed this lesson to help my fifth grade students with this challenging concept. I used this anchor chart to introduce the basic differences between the two types of summaries. Students glued a smaller copy of the anchor chart into their reader's notebooks for future reference.

We discussed that all summaries include the main idea of the text, the most important ideas, key words, and must be in our own words - no copying! To begin, we focused on the nonfiction summary, which seems to be easier for the students to grasp. I selected several great nonfiction articles to practice this skill. For the first article, we read and discussed the text together. Then I showed the students an example summary I had written. We went through the summary and identified the main idea and a sentence explaining each subsection. Then, we circled all the key vocabulary words that I used. For this part, I used the article "Masters of Disguise."

This is an article from Scholastic News that I found at www.infohio.org. I love using articles from Scholastic News because they have clearly labeled vocabulary words and divide the article into labeled subsections. For the next article, we completed the summary together in students' reader's notebooks. We used the article "Bionic Animals." This is another high-interest article from Scholastic News, which can be found at www.infohio.org.

Students completed the third summary independently. For this part of the lesson, I used the article "I Use a Robot to Go to School." (You guessed it! Another article from Scholastic News that can be found at www.infohio.org.)

Students wrote their independent summaries in their reader's notebooks. Once students had proofread their summaries, they switched with another student. This student used a post-it note to evaluate the other student's summary. They wrote about strengths and weaknesses within the summary and then placed the post-it in the student's reader's notebook. When finished, I reviewed all the summaries. Stay tuned for fiction summaries!