Students must learn that summaries include the most important details of a story. I am going to read Wemberly Worried. I break the story into sections for students to summarize. As we summarize we record our details on the beginning, middle, and end chart (I have included one in the resource section.)
Then, we read all three parts together to represent their total summary of the story.
Although this is heavily scaffolded (I have given students the different parts to summarize and we are using a very familiar read aloud), I did teach this lesson in the beginning of the year. My hope is that this will lay the foundation for students to, later, use this practice and apply summarizing to new texts with rich, complex story lines.
Students will use a story from our basal that is on their reading level to summarize the beginning, middle, and end of their story. I want them to stop after the beginning and summarize. This will help them be able to pick out the important information from that part of the story. They are still learning how to use their own words and choose the most important information. So stopping forces them to focus on one section of the story at a time. As they work I see students practicing the hand motions I taught them.
Here are some student work samples and my analysis of the student work:
As a closing activity, we review our hand gestures to help us summarize.
Stop
Think
Retell the important information using our own words.