Summarizing Goal Ideas
- Given a visual and minimal support, NAME will summarize a familiar picture book including 5+ parts from the story in 3 consecutive sessions.
- Given a familiar visual and graphic organizer, NAME will summarize simple texts using 5 elements (somebody, wanted, but, so, then) in 2 out of 3 opportunities across 2 consecutive sessions.
Read more about my goals here.
Summarizing Stories Resources
Here are my favorite resources that target narrative summarizing skills for language therapy:
Teaching Narrative Summarizing
Narrative summarizing uses a different structure than informational text summarizing (which is typically structured using main idea + details).
My favorite narrative summarizing structure to teach my students is “somebody, wanted, but, so, then” (SWBST).
You can change the difficulty of story retell tasks by adjusting how many story grammar elements to include when summarizing. To start, I teach my students that at a minimim, to summarize a story, they need to include:
- Set the Scene (who, where, and/or when)
- Problem (what goes wrong)
- Solution/Resolution (how it’s solved)
With that said, I often try to get my learners to include a little more information in their retells. Like I shared above, the most common structure I teach for summarizing stories is somebody, wanted, but, so, then.
Here’s the prompting questions I use when teaching this summarizing structure:
Somebody: Who is the story about?
Wanted: What did they want? What was their goal?
But: What went wrong? What got in their way?
So: What did they plan to do next? What did they do?
Then: How did it all end?
To teach this skill directly and systematically, first, teach one part at a time using visuals and examples.
Then, you can combine this information into a sentence (or 2 or 3) to quickly create a summary. Here’s some examples from popular movies:
- “Hiccup wanted to prove he was a real Viking. But, he didn’t fit in and people didn’t take him seriously. So, he befriended a dragon named Toothless. Then, together, they saved the village and lived happily ever after.”
- “Meilin wanted to go to a concert with her friends. But, anytime she got excited, she transformed into a Red Panda! So, she learned to embrace herself, including the Red Panda inside her. Then, Meilin and her friends went to the concert and Meilin bonded with her mom.”
Could you identify the movie based on my summary? 😉
In order to practice summarizing stories using this structure, you can use short narrative texts, graphic organizers, and visuals.
This structure is not only easy to use, it’s easy to remember, even outside of your speech therapy sessions.
Sequencing Skills in Context
To work on summarizing in context, simply apply the SWBST summarizing structure to stories you read in your therapy room and real life experiences your students have had!
Here’s an example of a graphic organizer I’ve used with students to summarize everything from picture books to classroom texts to peer conflicts!
Tasks like summarizing are fantastic because they pull together so many language skills (on top of summarizing) including Story Elements, Sentence Combining, and problem solving.
In addition to summarizing classroom content, you can summarize picture books, movies, real life situations, or even Pixar Shorts (you can find several for free on YouTube).
Happy summarizing!
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