Summarizing Teaching Resources

Teach students to summarize fiction and non-fiction texts with printable worksheets, graphic organizers, anchor charts, digital activities and more teaching resources created for your elementary classroom.

Designed by teachers, for teachers, the resources in this collection are aligned with the Common Core curriculum and have undergone a careful review by a member of our expert teaching team to ensure they help students build foundational literacy skills.

You'll find editable versions to easily differentiate your instruction for individual students, plus a variety of options to make lesson planning easier this school year so your students will be able to identify the main idea of a text, draw inferences, remember key details and more.

New to teaching this portion of the English curriculum or just looking for fresh and engaging ways to teach students how to summarize? Read on for a primer from our teacher team!

What Is Summarizing?

Summarizing is the reading comprehension strategy that helps kids become more effective readers and more effective writers. It involves condensing a large amount of information into a shorter, more concise version.

Learning to identify the main idea and key details in a text helps young readers better understand what they have read and retain the information more effectively.

From there, summarizing helps students develop their writing skills, requiring them to synthesize the information they've learned and present it clearly and concisely in summary form.

How to Summarize

Before students learn to summarise, they typically learn to retell a story — recalling and describing the key events and details of a story in the order they occur. Summarizing is related to retelling, but it's a more nuanced and advanced skill that kids develop later in elementary school.

To summarize, students need to learn to choose details carefully rather than describing the story or paragraph in full. They need to condense just the most important information from the story into a brief overview or synopsis called a summary.

They also have to select and prioritize information so they can present it concisely in a way that makes sense to the reader.

When summarizing, students may complete one or more of the following:

• Recount the text in their own words
• Identify the main idea, topic or purpose
• List key words or phrases
• Identify structural elements of the genre

What Is SWBST?

Using the SWBST process can help students create their summaries and serves as a great mnemonic when teaching reading comprehension. The steps in the SWBST process are:

1. Somebody
2. Wanted
3. But
4. So
5. Then

Using these words, students can break down a paragraph or story into its key elements, working through the main character (somebody), the what (what they wanted), the conflict (but), what happened as a result of the conflict (the so) and wrapping up with the conclusion (then).