When we were asked to choose a literacy topic to share with fellow teachers I immediately knew I wanted to work with

the topic of comprehension. Comprehension is a skill that comes up quite frequently in a childs day. A child needs to know how to take what they read and make sense of it across all subjects that they are learning. My next step was to pick one particular topic to discuss within comprehension. Personally, I have always struggled with summarizing. It is difficult for me to take what I read and then put that information into different words to make it concise and to the point. Since I have personal difficulty with it, it makes it one of those skills that are difficult for me to teach. By researching the importance of summarizing, I hoped to not only learn new techniques to help teach summarizing to students but also learn techniques that will come in useful when I am being asked to summarize. Best Practices in Literacy Instruction states that summarizing is a reading comprehension strategy. The task of reading comprehension is so very involved that students can be taught many strategies to help improve their reading comprehension skills. Dr. Sharon Valpole, from the University of Delaware, also describes summarizing in a similar way. She describes reading comprehension as very complicated. She made an acronym, PICTURE, to help teachers remember the steps of teaching reading comprehension. The R in this acronym stands for Review/Summarize. Dr. Valpole suggests that a good reader checks to see if what they are making in their head makes sense. Both the authors of Best Practices in Literacy Instruction and Dr. Valpole suggest that summarizing is a skill that the teacher must teach to their students through direct instruction. The teacher needs to model to his/her students how they are thinking and coming to their conclusions. An article from the International Reading Association titled "Using Mental Imagery and Summarization to Achieve Independence in Comprehension describes summarizing as a way to

help students acquire strategies for reorganizing information text in a manner that is meaningful to them. Students need to realize that summarizing is a skill that they use in many different subjects and situations throughout their life. It is used in everything from subjects at school to telling a friend about a movie they saw. Since summarizing is something that is so heavily used, but not something that comes naturally; the first thing this article suggests that teachers do when teaching summarization is to model. Teachers should read a passage then think out loud as they make a summary. Students have to know what makes up a summary before they are able to make one. After the students have seen their teacher make a summary, this article gives two recommendations on ways for them to practice. Either providing students with a few different summaries or have students come up with the main idea of the text in one sentence. In the first way, students should read the summaries and discuss with their peers which one is the strongest. In the second suggestion students should find a way to state the important facts concisely in one brief sentence. The authors of this article believe which technique a teacher uses to teach is not that important. The most important thing is that the child makes real life connections to summarizing and they know how meaningful it is that they are able to pull out main ideas. B. Taylor, the author of A summarizing strategy to improve middle grade students reading a writing skills suggests teaching children summarizing through a hierarchical approach. This approach is geared towards summarizing textbook chapters. This hierarchical approach has five steps. The first step is called previewing. In this step the children begin to make an outline. They write a roman numeral for every heading, then a capital letter for every subheading, and skip a few lines to write supporting details. The next steps are readings and summarizing in the form of an outline. With teachers help, this is where the students read the text and come up with a main idea in their own words. They write this next to their roman

numeral. They also find supporting details. The key in this technique is for everything the students write to be in their own words. The last steps are studying and retelling orally. At this time the students study the outline that they have read and share what they learned with a partner. Since this technique of teaching summarization is geared towards the comprehension of text books, it would work best for upper grades. The next technique teachers can use to teach their students how to summarize is more of a kinesthetic approach. Joyce E. Eddie describes a plan that first has students reading to themselves to learn about the plot. The teacher then gets the children to generate supporting details by asking them questions such as What helps you know about the problem? The teacher helps the students decide what is important and what details would be best left out. The details are cut into strips, the order is mixed up and they work in groups to reconstruct the plot. This is a wonderful activity to get children used to picking out important information in what they read. Summarizing is a reading comprehension skill that lets the reader recall important information. As we get older this skill gets more fine-tuned. According to Valerie Ellery, it takes a strategic reader to summarize not only after reading, but while they are still reading and to put details in their own words instead of just retelling facts. Teachers should practice using specific vocabulary daily with their children. The more children are used to words such as first, next and then, the more comfortable they will be to incorporate them into retelling stories. Even though summarizing can be a complex and difficult skill, if teachers model this skill daily with their students, they can all be successful at recognizing important details and recalling information from the text they read.

References Gambrell, L.B., Morrow, L.M., & Pressley, M. (Eds.) (2011). Best practices in literacy instruction (4th ed.). New York, NY: Guilford Press. http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid72342307001?bckey=AQ~~,AAAAAFwNJhQ~, 2UA9EcWU7eO5Fa-JT42GjxJJVHWSIQeF&bclid=23703871001&bctid=1892187603 Taylor. B.M., (1982). A summarizing strategy to improve middle grade students reading and writing skills. The reading Teacher (vol. 36) No. 2. Pp. 202-205. Gambrell. L.B., Kapinus, B.A., & Wilson. R.M., (1987). Using mental imagery and summarization to achieve independence in comprehension. Journal of reading. (vol. 30) No. 7. Pp. 638-642. Ellery. V. How do we teach reading as a strategic, decision-making process? IRA bookshelf. Eddy. J. (1988). Summaries and sequence for active comprehension. The reading teacher. (vol. 41). No. 9. Pp. 969-972.