A free printable to help your child write summaries. This is useful in elementary through high school to help your child write summaries.
Summarizing is one of the hardest parts of writing and reading for kids. Teachers expect details, but not too many. They want to know about a specific event or book, but rewriting the summary on the back of the book isn’t acceptable and telling the play-by-play is just way too much information. Here’s a free printable to help your child write summaries. This is useful in elementary through high school summarizing activities.
(Learn more: 3 Ways To Get Your Kids Reading This Summer)
Use this printable in writing, reading, social studies, science, current events… nearly any classroom assignment of “summarize” will be a bit easier using this simple graphic organizer.
How to use this free summarizing worksheet
To help your child with a summary, ask him first to identify the event, reading, or book and write a brief “what happened?” summary. It may be as simple as “she found the dog,” “he was elected president”, or, in the case of the sample below, based on the Power Outage during the 2013 Super Bowl, “the power went out.”
To make things even easier, I have kids fold back the first box so that they only have to think about a basic summary first.
Next, ask children to fill in the boxes identifying who, where, when, and why. No sentences are necessary here, just the details.
Finally, move to the bottom. What happened? Box. This time, children should combine their answers in the green and blue boxes to write 3-5 detailed sentences that will summarize the event, topic, or story.
Sample Event Summary
Please enjoy this free printable from Julieverse!
