Sequencing and Summarizing in a Folktale

Gosh, I miss having a class of my own. As a literacy coach, the teachers are my students...and the students are our students, but they're not MY students. I have to share them with their teachers. It's hard, sometimes.... and then sometimes, when I see a teacher filling out an office referral, or submitting grades, or doing anything else I don't like to do, I don't miss it so much. But most of the time, I do.

Anyway, this past week, I've been a modeling fool. My modeling career is really taking off in fourth grade, where I'm modeling reading and writing lessons for a teacher who just had to close her kindergarten section and move to fourth grade three weeks after school started.

Don't ask.

She's been great, and I've been loving modeling in her room! This week, we worked on sequencing and summarizing the plot's events in a folktale. Some folktales are great sources for this kind of plot teaching because there's a clear lesson supported by the problem and the solution. To teach this, we chose The Little Ant, by Joe Hayes. He's kind of a local favorite.

We read The Little Ant to students and gave them little cards with the main events of the story.

 

After the reading, during which students each had a copy, the students used the text evidence to sequence the events in the story. We had them identify the important elements: the main character, her motivation, the problem, solution, outcome, and lesson.

 

After students sequenced the events, we checked them together using the text evidence from the story. 

Then, we gave each pair of students a fiction story map. They decided on the elements and glued them on.

 From there, we gave each team a blank sentence strip and told them the element they were responsible for. Students in the group wrote a sentence describing their element from the story. They created them in complete sentences. We put them together on our five summary elements of fiction pocket chart to create a super summary of the story.

This scaffolding has really supported students in summarizing and thinking about the important elements in most fiction stories. By generalizing the learning, I'm hoping we've helped them make connections to their own reading!


To help kids practice the work we've done during Reader's Workshop to students' independent reading, I created this Fiction Lapbook. It includes folded flap books for students to use when reading their own stories or novels. The skills included are the five fiction summary elements, different types of questions, character analysis, character relationships, cause-effect relationships, and comparing characters! I'm so excited to use it with our kids!

You can get it at TPT!       Pin It

Summarizing in Fiction

Does summarizing make you want to pull your hair out? How many times have you shouted to kids, "JUST THE IMPORTANT PARTS!" while sobbing over a stack of copied 'responses' taken verbatim from the text? 

Well, yeah, summarizing is hard. But if we can give kids tools and a focus, we can help them be far more successful when it comes to fiction summarizing. 

Summarizing requires kids to understand the text structure, determine what's important, and write it in a logical way. Yikes; we're asking a lot from some of our struggling readers. Without the proper scaffolding, they're really going to be playing a guessing game. 

Over the last couple years, I've put together a strategy that has been very supportive of our kids, able and struggling readers alike. This is it:

   

Ok, so maybe it doesn't look like much. But trust me, I no longer tear out my hair for lack of decent summaries! 

It all starts with identifying the important events in the plot. You can read about what we did to scaffold students' understanding of the plot's main events here, in my post about The Sweetest Fig. 

 

From there, we identified these four out of the five elements of the plot:

Main Character

Goal/Motivation

Problem/Conflict

Solution/Resolution

Outcome/Lesson Learned

All of these elements are written on colored index cards on a pocket chart. We consistently use the same colors so students will be able to use this system independently. This chart will stay up for as long as we learn about fiction, in order to help students recall the important elements to summarize.

Each team received one sentence strip to create a complete sentence to represent their assigned element. These are the sentences they came up with to summarize the plot's main events from The Sweetest Fig.

 

 

In case you can't read it, it says, "Mr. Bibot is disrespectful to Marcel the dog. Mr. Bibot wants money. Bibot received special figs, (we verbally added the following) that he wanted to use to be the richest man in the world. But then, Marcel ate the last fig! Marcel's dream came true instead of Bibot's. Lesson Learned: Treat other people the way you want to be treated.

It's far from beautiful, but it includes the important elements, in a logical order! Now it's easy to do some basic revising and include some transition words to write a great summary!

But here's the tricky part. We teach kids to create a summary based on something they've read. This is an essential and invaluable skill. But then, when we test them, we do it differently. They have to find the best summary out of four versions. 

This is very different from what we've asked them to do, and it can be hard for students who are struggling or not as sophisticated in their thinking to make the connection. So this is how I bridge it:

Do you see on the right side of the picture where there are four different paragraphs, all colored up? Those are four different summary versions for The Sweetest Fig. I wrote them myself :) One of them is the BEST, that is, it is the most complete and most accurate, compared to the other summaries - the other three are lacking something, so are NOT the best. 

 

To have students evaluate these summaries, I asked each student in each group to decide which element they were going to hunt for and grab that colored marker. Some had more than one element. They read through the summary as a group and marked their evidence for each element in the summary. If their element was missing from the summary, they made a little note on the bottom of the page. After they marked up each of the four summaries, they decided which was the BEST summary. Students were very successful with this scaffolding!

 

This 5 element strategy lines up very well with the Somebody Wanted But So Then strategy; they both represent similar elements!

Fisher-Reyna on TPT have some handy free tools to help you teach these elements of fiction as well.

And one of the folded flapbooks in my brand-new fiction lapbook is all about the elements of fiction! It's only $2.00 at TPT!

Check them out!

Happy Teaching!

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Summarizing Informational Texts: Using Main Ideas!

For the past few weeks, my job as a literacy coach has taken me into classrooms to support kids who are in need of some extra reading intervention. In the past, the model has been to pull these students out of the classroom, but the ore we pull kids out, the less they know what's going on, and they're often missing something important in the room. 
I have been working with kids in third, fourth, and fifth grade, and have really enjoyed it. It made me miss the classroom (for the most part!). 
After speaking with the teacher about what the students needed support in, we settled on some lessons about summarizing nonfiction. This is a difficult strategy for many students to apply. It requires them to identify the topic and then use that to determine what is important in each section of the text. Then we combine those important ideas into a complete summary. Here's what we did:

 We started out with a short text that I found at Readworks.org. There are lots of great passages about all different topics, in fiction and expository format on Readworks. And it's free!

I used a blank thinking guide from Fisher Reyna Education to help us focus on the topic, main idea of the article, and the main ideas of each paragraph.

First we previewed the text including the title, subtitle, and any images or nonfiction features. We made a prediction based on this evidence, and we read through the article once to confirm or adjust our predictions.

After we read through once, we discussed the topic of the article and recorded it on our sheets. We then read through one paragraph at a time to identify the main idea of each paragraph. To help students do this, I ask them to notice repeated ideas and to identify what idea is supported in all the sentences of a paragraph, or what the sentences have in common.

Once we had identified each main idea, we decided to bundle them. We read through paragraphs one and two and identified the common idea in both of them. Then we left paragraph three by itself, combined four and five into one main idea, and combined six and seven into another. We wrote a few words to identify what bundles we had made.

Students had been practicing writing open-ended summaries for weeks, so I thought I'd try a scaffolded response by providing some choices. I wrote four different versions of a summary for the article. One was complete and accurately represented all of the main ideas we identified. The others were either missing an important piece and overly represented a small detail, or misrepresented some information in the article.

On each choice, the students identified which main ideas were represented and which pieces were omitted. After they evaluated each one, they chose the summary that most accurately represented the important information in the article. 
For a whole class setting, I have provided each group with a different version of a summary and had the team evaluate it. Then they had to get up and present to the rest of the class to explain whether their summary was a great choice or a less-than-great choice.
I found that providing some answer choices for the kids to evaluate helped them make the connection to test-taking without having to do passage after passage! A simple activity like this at the end of a close reading could help kids practice this skill in an easy way.
To get the Thinking Guide and any other tools for helping students be successful through an understanding of genre, check out FisherReyna Education on TPT!
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Summarizing nonfiction

So the other day I shared how I took an article, cut it up, and collaboratively re-created it with my fourth and fifth grade pull-out intervention group. That went really well and you can read about it here. Over the past couple days, my students and I took those articles we reconstructed and re-read them in one piece.  This was the article I read with third and fourth grade. 

 With fourth grade, I used the article as a way to review writing a nonfiction summary to process text. I wanted students to think about using the structure of the article (divided into sections with headings) to help them write their summary.

With third grade, I wanted to practice the same skill, but my third graders have trouble differentiating between the most important ideas, or main ideas of sections, and specific facts or details. To support this, I wrote a variety of statements from the article on sentence strips. 

Some ideas (Meerkats live in burrows under the ground) were very specific facts from the article. Others (Meerkats help each other by taking turns looking out for predators) were main ideas from the article. Using these sentences in a pocket chart, as well as the headings for each section and the title, we made decisions about the following things:

1. Which pieces of information are important and which are specific facts?

2. Which pieces of information would be included in a summary?

3. How can the title/headings help us choose what is important and organize it?

4. What order should the important information be sequenced in to be in logical order?

We made a little chart to help us with interesting vs. important. I forgot to take a picture! But this is the general idea:

Interesting: a specific fact or detail. Makes you say, "Wow!" or "I didn't know that!". May not be related to the main idea or purpose of the article. (real-life example: toys. They're not necessary, but we like them)

Important: a big idea. Related to the main idea or purpose of the article. Headings/titles can give you clues about what will be important in the article. (real-life example: food. It might not be fun, but it's necessary)

Still, though, this was tough for my third graders. This is what we came up with. I marked the words in the sentences that helped us identify if the statement was related to the main idea/topic of the article.

Overall, not a bad lesson. Wish I'd had a little more time to spend with them, though. Half an hour was kind of rushed.

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