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9th grade · English Language Arts · Unit 8 of 12

Summarizing Texts

Find the main ideas and put them in your own words.

What your child practices

Practices summarizing: grouping related ideas, separating important from less important information, paraphrasing and keeping the author's message.

Alaska content standards learning standard: RI.9-10.2 · finding central ideas and summarizing in your own words

How we explain it

Children can open this short lesson before they practice.

  1. Find the main ideas: topic sentences and key terms help.
  2. Leave out small details and examples. Group related ideas.
  3. Use your own words and keep the author’s message. Test it: would someone who hasn’t read it understand?

Example: Which belongs in a summary of a flood news story: what happened, where and the main effects, or every person’s quote? A summary keeps only the most important points. Every quote is too much detail. Answer: what happened, where, and the main effects

Summarizing Texts in Alaska

In the Alaska content standards, this is unit 8 of 12 in 9th grade English Language Arts, after Forms & Features and before Form & Composing.

Gradelings describes a child's practice on this unit as Beginning, Approaching, Meeting or Exceeding (Four practice steps). That reflects practice, not a report-card mark: the teacher decides the mark.

Source: Alaska Department of Education and Early Development

Sample questions

A taste of this unit. In the app, questions change every time and get easier or harder to match your child.

  1. Question 1

    Which of these is the most important in a summary?

    • minor examples
    • main ideas
    • the page numbers

  2. Question 2

    Which sentence is the best summary of this passage? “Honeybees dance to tell the hive where flowers are. A longer wiggle means a farther flower. The angle shows the direction.”

    • Honeybees use dance to share the location of food.
    • Flowers grow in many places.
    • Honeybees are insects.

  3. Question 3

    Copying sentences straight from a text and calling it a summary is…

    • plagiarism
    • inferring
    • paraphrasing

  4. Question 4

    Which is an effective way to check your summary?

    • make it twice as long
    • see if someone who has not read the text understands the main points
    • count adjectives

  5. Question 5

    A summary should be…

    • shorter than the original
    • longer than the original
    • exactly as long

  6. Question 6

    Which sentence is a summary, not a detail?

    • The story shows how a community works together after a storm.
    • The storm began at 6 p.m.
    • Mr. Lee wore a red scarf.

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