Summarizing Fiction

One thing I have to work on every year is teaching students how to summarize. I think I’ve tried every graphic organizer there is, but I’ve never been completely satisfied with the results. Then a friend lent me the book When Kids Can’t Read by Kylene Beers (Heinemann 2003), and she talks about ways to summarize both fiction and nonfiction. I tried her suggestions, and I felt like I had better summaries this year than I ever have. There is still room for me to improve, but you might like to see what I tried.

Many of you will be familiar with the Somebody Wanted But So format for fiction, and this is really just a refinement of that format. It is easiest to model this with a picture book.  The difference in this particular SWBS chart is that instead of just picking one character and cramming all their information  into one row, the student can consider each character, what they want, what gets in their way, and how they resolve their problems. Below is a picture of a SWBS chart I did for William Steig’s book Doctor DeSoto. Notice that I did a row for Doctor DeSoto, and then a row for the fox.  You could use this with a longer text, like a chapter book; you would just need to add more rows for more characters. I think it would work if you wanted to summarize on a chapter by chapter basis as well.

After finishing the chart, I then tried to combine the information into a summarizing paragraph. This proved to be easier with some texts than others, and that’s still the part I have to work on teaching better. But I found that the conversations I had with students as they were working through the chart were valuable and more in depth than other summarizing conversations I have had before. Is there a way you’ve found to effectively teaching summary writing?