Does this sound like your classroom? It sure did mine, until...
RL 4.2 requires students to determine a theme of a story by referring to the details in the text AND summarizing that text. After reading this standard for maybe the, I don't know, umpteenth time in a row, it clicked. I was teaching these skills in isolation, not as a stepping stone for the latter. When teaching students which details to pull from the text to support a given theme, it would later be used as a strategy to help them decipher which details were important enough to include in the summary!
Here's the Breakdown:
1. Theme. Students had to be able to read a text and identify the theme the author was teaching the reader.
For example, in "A Bad Case of Stripes" by David Shannon, the theme is to always be yourself.
A colleague once said, when teaching theme it's important to ask your readers, "Did the author sit down one day and decide to write a story about a girl who wouldn't eat Lima beans and therefore turned into a house?! NO! He wanted to teach us to be ourselves even if that means standing out...the girl with the Lima beans taught us that valuable lesson." We must help them understand the big picture of the story...the lesson we learn about the world around us and ourselves. That's the meaning of reading, after all.
2. Evidence. It is vital students practice identifying strong pieces of evidence to support their thinking. It shows a deeper level of understanding--the 3rd level of Webb's Depth of Knowledge.
This is an on-going skill for some students. It's important to let students critique one another, sharing if they felt that one piece of evidence was the best proof that theme was included in the story or if another would have been more clear.
This is the moment where students start asking the question, "But does it really show the reader the theme?" If the answer is no, it wasn't that necessary to include as evidence. When they can get to this conclusion...they're ready for summarizing.
3. Summary. When students are capable of evaluating the information they are pulling from the text, the summary becomes more purposeful. This is key. A summary with a purpose. No more guessing what to include or what not to include.
I taught my fourth graders to think of the theme as the conclusion for the summary. Everything in the text that helped the author lead up to the theme would be important to include in the summary. If it was an interesting detail that held the reader's attention, it could probably be omitted. This helped them ask that vital question again and again! "Does it really show the reader the theme?"
We collected a chart to help us remember story elements that may impact the theme such as:
- What is the character like in the beginning?
- What makes them this way?
- Does something important happen to them?
- How do they react?
- Does anything help them grow or change?
- How do they change?
- What do they learn?
We felt like if they were answering these questions, the theme would be quite clear in their summary!
While this standard is quite vague...how did I decide what made an acceptable summary? Our fourth grade team debated what we felt must be included in a summary to call it mastery. We created the following rubric to show the expectations clearly:
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| Click here for a free download of this rubric. |
In the end, my students were creating concise, but thorough summaries...a description I had never used to describe my students' summaries. This strategy worked wonders on my instruction and their mastery of the skill. I hope it works for you!
Have a summarization strategy you love? Share it below!
