Summarizing Lesson and Activities- Comprehension Crew

Are you seeking an engaging and effective approach to teaching writing summaries? Look no further! This comprehensive summarizing lesson plan and activities provide a fun and engaging way to introduce and reinforce this essential skill with any book.

Unlock the Power of Summarization with Sophia The Summarizer!

This resource equips you with everything necessary to introduce and teach summarizing to your students effectively. Sophia guides students in determining important events and characters, organizing them to retell the story.

She offers two summarizing strategies – “First, Then, Next, Last” or “Somebody, Wanted, But, So, Then” – allowing flexibility to suit your students’ needs and preferences. With Sophia’s guidance, students gain confidence in summarizing texts, ensuring comprehensive understanding.

With concrete representations through character portrayal, this resource facilitates active engagement with the reading skill. The lesson format can be seamlessly applied to any book, fostering repeated practice and reinforcement.

Empower Your Teaching with Comprehensive Resources

Explore a variety of activities included in this resource, designed to cater to diverse learning styles and reading levels. From character posters to interactive notebook pages, our resource offers a consistent framework for reinforcing summarizing skills with any text, time and time again.

The resource includes the following:

• Character Posters & Visual Aids *including strategies to summarize
• Character Profile– includes character profession, theme song, prop, gesture, phrase, likes, and how they help reader
• Concrete Summarizing Activity
• Introduction & Modeling Lesson Plan– can be applied to any book
• Teacher Implementation Tips
• Graphic Organizers– 35 differentiated options for any text
• Flip Books– 6 options that can be used with any text
• Interactive Notebook pages
• Task Cards with Photographs– includes answer key and differentiated answer sheets
• Task Cards with Short Text– includes answer key and differentiated answer sheets
• Practice Passages– differentiated texts and scaffolded response options with answer keys included (lower readability- Talent Show & higher readability- Lemonade Stand)

Bonus:

• Mentor Text Suggestions featuring picture books and wordless picture books
• Updated version includes graphic organizers, worksheets, and posters in Google Slides for convenient student interaction!

What is the Comprehension Crew?

The Comprehension Crew comprises characters, each representing an essential reading skill. These characters serve as tangible models to reinforce skills both in life and in text, aiding students in understanding, retention, and intentional skill application. Transform your teaching and inspire a love of learning in your students today!

Who are the other Comprehension Crew characters?

There are characters representing each of the following reading skills:

• inferencing

• questioning

• predicting

• summarizing

• clarifying

• connecting– TRY FOR FREE!

• synthesizing

• evaluating

• visualizing

• theme

Non-fiction reading skills:

• determining importance
• main idea
• text features
• text structure
• vocabulary

Teacher Reviews

2nd/ 3rd grade teacher Gwen said, “Engaging and easy to follow format that really helped my students understand summarizing rather than retelling.”

2nd grade teacher Sami said, “When introducing this my students were so intrigued with Sophia the summarizer and interested in learning about her. It was crazy how quickly they picked up on the concept of summarizing simply from using Sophia and her bio about her! We used the story A Chair for My Mother and the kids did an outstanding job of summarizing! This a resource I will always use when summarizing because the visual aspect is key to the kids understanding and remembering how to summarize. I will be looking into other members of the comprehension crew because I LOVED this one!”

If you have any questions about this resource or how to best use it in your classroom, I am happy to help! Please email me at [email protected] or Instagram message me at Lessons_by_the_lake. Thank you!