Teach how to write a summary...

Summary writing is a skill that all students need to learn how to do. It is a skill that will be used in English class, in social sciences classes and in science classes throughout the student's academic career. It will also be a skill that students will be able to use once they start their careers. It is because summary writing is such an important skill that teachers will need to focus specific lesson plans on its development.

Summary Writing for English Class

The first class that students will most likely be asked to write a summary is in their English class. Here the summaries will focus on grammatical structure and format. Students will use these summaries to condense information found in the essays that they write, to condense the information found in chapters that they have read or to condense information from lectures and other learning mediums.

When teaching students how to write a summary for their English class teachers will want to start by defining the requirements for the assignment. For example, they will need to define how many pages the summary will be, what information the summary will need to contain and the reason for the summary. All of these factors will influence the information contained within the final summary.

The next step will be to provide students with an example summary. This summary will need to highlight what the teacher is looking for. Each the required elements will need to be underlined and defined for the student. For example, in a summary on a fictional story chapter the summary will need to highlight main characters, symbolism and storyline points.

Summary Writing for Science Class

Writing a summary for science class is slightly different than writing one for English class. Science summaries need to focus on specific elements of a science report. For example, a summary for power house experiments will need to provide an ouline of steps taken to set up and execute the experiment, as well as a brief summary of the findings.

There are several different types of summaries that are required in science class. The first type is an abstract summary. This summary is about 150 to 250 words and it summarized a research project's hypothesis, background information, methodology and findings. The second type of summary is a resource summary. These summaries are completed for articles and reference materials that are used for a research project's background information. These summaries can range between a few sentences to several pages, depending on the amount of information contained in the reference item.

When teaching students how to write a summary for science class teachers will want to focus on each type of summary separately. They will need to provide students with examples of each summary and they will need to walk them through writing a few of these summaries. It can be helpful to develop a printable that can be handed out to students that provides an example format of each summary type.

Conclusion

It is a good idea to introduce students to summary writing at the beginning of the school year. This way when you cover the specific types of summaries later in the year, such as when you develop lesson plans to teach science fair projects, you won't have to spend as much time on the mechanics of writing a summary. You can just focus on the meat of the module instead.

Written by :

Shimo