After an in-class lesson on a topic, provide students with worksheets that help them summarize major points of the discussion. Use "write about" worksheets that provide students with sections for main topics, keywords and drawings that illustrate the subject. After students fill in these lesson elements, they will then write a summary paragraph using all keywords and circling them in the text. Students should practice this summarizing technique with partners first and then individually.
Review with students the concept of summarizing and invite them to create summaries by using hand gestures. As you read through a short story, the students will select keyword or phrases from the story and assign hand gestures to them. Following the story, they will act out the keyword gestures to create a visual summary. You can also ask students to make drawings that summarize the key concepts in a story.
Teachers can enhance the summarizing skills of elementary students by asking them to write summaries in their journals. Each morning students will write summaries of events from the day before. Ask students to document instances from their daily lives by first breaking the events into keywords, then using the keywords to write a summary. Writing about familiar topics will help students to find the important details of stories to include in summaries.
Read students something that includes a lot of data and ask them to create fact sheets by drawing out significant information. You can read them material about geography, science and historical events, and ask them to break it down into facts. Once they have a list of facts and statistics, ask them to write one-paragraph summaries about the topics. As students write, they can check off the key facts to make sure they include all pertinent information.