Summarizing Nonfiction

In past when I taught kids how to write nonfiction summaries, I focused on the 5 W questions: who, what, where, when, why, and the H: how. I had kids make a chart, fill in the information, and then showed them how to link those ideas into a short paragraph. And it worked – when we were reading something with dates, and causes and effects. But when we were reading something that was more descriptive, say an article on bats, that format wasn’t as user-friendly.

Then a teacher friend showed me an article (or part of a book chapter – I will credit this idea when I find the source) where the teacher encouraged her students to first write a gist statement, identifying an overarching theme or big idea. Then the students wrote several sentences with examples to support the gist statement. The last sentence was a concluding sentence that tied their ideas together.

I tried this with many different texts last year, and generally had better success than I’ve had in the past, but I had to get used to the idea that not all summaries would be exactly the same, as they tended to be using the W question chart. For example, one book we used this strategy with was Teammates by Peter Golenbock, a nonfiction narrative about Jackie Robinson and his teammate PeeWee Reese. After reading, I had the kids write a gist statement. I got a variety of statements such as “Teammates is about friendship.” “Teammates is about bravery.” “Teammates is about racial inequality.” All of those statements are true – and all of them are fine gist statements to start with. The students then had to find examples from the story to support their gist statement, which they did, and then write a concluding sentence (generally the hardest part for them). Many used the same examples, but there was a bit a variation to the others. It’s fun to have kids read their summaries, because they can see what other kids thought was important enough to include, and how that compared to their own work.

One of the other reasons I became a big fan of this format is because it echoes the format of the traditional essay. We only write one essay a year, and I was looking for ways to extend that practice without writing whole essays, and this format is really just a mini essay. Kids are working on gist statements, which are topic sentences, they support their thinking, and they write a concluding sentence.  I will definitely use this format again, and introduce it much earlier – I think it will make writing the longer essays that much easier.