Background

Historians and geographers must read large amounts of information to gather important facts. One of the skills that they must use is summarizing. Summarizing means choosing the most important facts in a piece of writing.

Activities

Summarize a Lesson
Choose one of the lessons on the website which you will use to practice your summarizing skills.  As you read, fill in this graphic organizer:

Next write a topic sentence which explains the main idea. Include the title of the lesson in your topic sentence.

Using only five sentences, write a summary that includes a topic sentence and key information from the beginning, middle and end of the lesson you read. Be sure to put ALL writing into your own words. Otherwise this is plagiarism. Also be sure to include transitions such as first, in the middle, and finally.

Challenge! Make your summary even shorter by trying to include the important information from the beginning, middle, and end of the text in ONE SENTENCE.

Checklist for Summary Writing _____Topic Sentence states main idea _____ Spelling is correct _____Information from: beginning middle end _____ Capitalization and Punctuation is correct _____ IN MY OWN WORDS