• Students identify important facts and details from informational texts.

• Students develop a main idea statement or topic sentence to begin their summary.  

• Students use facts and details to support their main idea statement in the order they were presented in the text.

• Teachers review and explain the term summary.

• Teachers discuss and model elements of a good summary.

• Teachers model locating important facts and details in an informational text.

• Teachers model using facts and details to form a summary.

• Teachers provide opportunities for students to summarize informational texts.

• Teachers provide opportunities for feedback over student-generated summaries. 

When students have difficulty determining important facts and details, teachers can…

• teach a lesson about determining importance.

• guide students in distinguishing between interesting (something new that the reader did not know) and important information (something that supports the main idea).

• use nonfiction text structures to determine the main idea of the entire text and to identify the important details.

• discuss examples and non-examples.

• reteach main idea and detail using sorts and/or graphic organizers. 

When students have difficulty orally summarizing teachers can...

• utilize organizers such as sentence stems and/or summary frames. 

• provide examples of poor and proficient summaries and have students justify their thinking by telling what is missing/wrong or what is done well.

• Informational: nonfiction text that contains facts and information. 

• Summarize: to reduce large selections of text to the base essentials, including only the key ideas or main points worth noting.

• Supporting Details: evidence that explains or backs up a main idea using reasons, examples, facts, or steps.

• 4.2.R.1: Main Idea/Details

• 4.3.R.7: Text Structure