Reading Comprehension Summarizing Group members: Mary Upshaw, Brittany Rutledge, Kasey McGovern, Clayton Cumbee

Summarizing o Builds on the organizational strategy of determining main ideas and supporting details o Improves comprehension and increases retention o Helps students understand the structure of text o Allows students to evaluate and monitor their understandings of what they have just read (metacognition) o Teachers can use summarizing methods to recap and activate prior knowledge when introducing related topics

Teaching Summarizing in the Classroom First, develop students' ability to summarize orally Retelling is a natural way to lead into summarizing Begin with short, easy, narrative text Group summaries can help students develop their skills on summarizing Model summarizing by providing summaries of selections read With younger students, emphasize inclusion of the most important information With more proficient students, teach techniques of condensing essential information to make it more concise Have students create semantic maps before writing summaries to aid in detecting important relationships among key ideas