Mastering Summarizing Fiction Texts

Are you currently teaching your students to summarize fiction texts? A crucial skill that enhances their comprehension and analytical abilities. This set of slides has been designed to equip students with the skills to effectively summarize fiction texts by identifying key elements within a narrative, including the main characters, setting, plot events, and central themes. By guiding students to summarize fiction texts effectively you’re encouraging them to distinguish between essential information and details allowing them to hone their ability to condense the storyline.

Summarizing vs Retell

Summarizing and retelling are both valuable skills in comprehension, but they differ in their focus and depth. summarizing involves distilling the main ideas and essential details of a text into a concise and cohesive overview, capturing the core elements without unnecessary details. This skill requires students to identify the central themes, key events, and main characters while omitting extraneous information. On the other hand, retelling involves narrating the story in a more detailed manner, often encompassing a chronological account of events. Retelling emphasises a thorough grasp of the narrative, encompassing character actions, dialogues, and specific plot points. While summarizing sharpens students’ ability to extract and articulate the core message efficiently, retelling allows for a more comprehensive exploration of the narrative’s richness. Both skills play a crucial role in developing students’ comprehension, communication, and critical thinking abilities.

Ready-Made Lessons on Summarizing 

This 18-slide presentation addresses the following content:

• What is a summary?
• Summarizing
• Summaries should and should not
• Summary checklist
• When to summarize
• How to summarize
• Summarizing fiction (using the SWBST strategy)
• Example

The slide deck also includes student activities to help students demonstrate their understanding of the concepts presented. These activities include:

• KWL Chart
• Turn and talk – think about when you had to summarize a text. What did you struggle with? What did you excel in?
• A couple of ‘show what you know’ questions and answers.

Download and Learn Today!

Use the dropdown menu to choose between this resource’s PowerPoint or Google Slide versions.

This resource was created by Lindsey Phillips, a teacher in Michigan and a Teach Starter collaborator.

More Summarizing Resources for the Classroom

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Practice summarizing small fiction texts with this fun color-coding set of worksheets.

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Help students remember the fundamentals of summarizing a story with this set of fun graphic organizers.

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Summarizing Poster Set

Learn about how to effectively summarize a piece of text with this classroom poster set.