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In this activity, we’re going to become summarising superstars!
When we summarise, we pick out key points from a text.
Summarising also picks out the main idea of a text.
Think about the last book you read.
Can you summarise the main events of the book in no more than 15 words?
Here’s the main idea of the last book I read:
A boy finds out he is a wizard and goes to wizard school.
In this summary, I haven’t mentioned all the extra information like what the boy looks like and what he eats for breakfast.
Summary questions often ask us to order events in a text.
Read this recount:
Yesterday was the best day of my life. My awesome dad treated me to a trip to the largest water park in the country.
Annoyingly, dad woke me up early to beat the traffic so I was a bit grumpy on the drive there. When we arrived, I saw the giant, colourful slides and forgot about the early start. Firstly, I went on the rapids. They were incredibly fun and the powerful water threw my body all over the place. I kept bashing and bouncing into other people. It was so funny. After that, I went on the dramatic drop slide. I was a little bit nervous at the top but I went for it and it was thrilling. Finally, we went in the wave pool and I loved jumping up and down with the movement of the waves. I can’t wait to visit again next year.
Here are the three main events from this recount:
The narrator went on the drop slide.
The narrator woke up early.
The narrator went on the rapids.
Which order do these three events go in?
The narrator went on the drop slide. 3
The narrator woke up early. 1
The narrator went on the rapids. 2
Sometimes, summarising questions ask us to sum up the main idea in one sentence.
What was the main idea of the recount?
It was that the narrator had a great time at the water park.
All the extra details like the descriptions of the slides and the journey there aren’t needed in a summary.
In this activity, we will use our summarising skills to summarise and order the main events from a story.
Let's get started!
