Summarizing Packet of Materials
Attached to this post is a packet of materials I helped create for students at the community college I worked at before I moved to Russia. It is designed primarily as a series of reading lessons with additional activities for summarizing and it utilizes the rhetorical structure of American newspaper articles as its basis for understanding and organizing what is read and summarized.
For each article, students are required to activate background knowledge and complete a series of pre-reading activities. After this, they read the articles, first for the main idea and second for specific details. Then they answer questions about what they read and discuss in groups their opinion of the article’s major themes.
Next students practice, one skill at a time, the steps in creating a brief summary of what they have read. For example, before students are asked to paraphrase the ideas in the article, they must be able to locate the main idea and write a short outline.
The lessons are:
Chapter 1: An Introduction to the Summary
Chapter 2: Finding the Main Idea
Chapter 3: Paraphrasing Part 1
Chapter 4: Writing the Main Idea
Chapter 5: Paraphrasing Part 2
Chapter 6: Outlining
Chapter 7: Working with Verbs
Chapter 8: Planning an In-class Summary
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