Welcome back! I'm glad you're reading along and I hope you find a thing or two that you can use in your room!

This post goes right along with my two previous ones. I've been hitting nonfiction text pretty hard since after the holidays. I started off by making sure the kids know what nonfiction text features are and how they benifit the reader. I talk all about that in the previous two posts. Here is a picture of the nonfiction text features I cover.



When I'm sure the kids are all settled in and feel comfortable with the text features I move into nonfiction summaries. We covered fiction summarization in the beginning of the year and I knew that nonfiction was going to look a lot different and be much more challenging for them. I made this sassy graphic organizer to help with that. I only have a picture here because I can't seem to located it in my files. UGH! I will find it though and put it up for all of you to use if you wish! (Promise)
I explain to the students that we focus on the title, pictures, and the first section to get our opening sentence. We then divide the article by sections using the headings. We give one sentence summarizing each section and add it to our organizer.
After we finish up the chart organizer we wrap it up and put in into a neat nice paragraph. I take this time to talk about grammar. I also talk about not wording our summary sentences the same as the author did in the original article. I tossed it all together and threw it on our bulliten board.


The kids are really getting good at summarizing. I think this skill will be a great resource to them as they get into the upper grade where they have to read and pick information out of text books on a regular basis.