Summarizing & The Story of Exodus

As part of our unit on Self-Monitoring in Language, we have been learning how to show that we have a good understanding of the text we read by writing summaries. In class, we read the story of Exodus in our religion books, and then wrote a summary of the story in partners. We wrote our summaries in Padlet, and I gave students the option of simply telling a summary using We Video. I was surprised that all the students decided to write their summary rather than use We Video! Not everyone had a chance to finish, but here is a link to the Padlet:

Exodus Padlet

Next, we reviewed how to write a good summary, because many of the summaries in the Padlet were very long. I try to explain to students that a retell is when you tell a story with a fair amount of detail, and a summary is when you tell the story with only the most important parts. 

A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself, "If I leave this part out, will the story still make sense?"

If the answer is yes, then it is probably not overly important. If the answer is no, then it is very important to the story. 

Our next step is to write summaries of the Exodus story individually, and check that students are able to limit the summary to only the most important ideas. This can be very challenging for students, because they want to write the story in a great amount of detail to show what they know. We will be working on this for this week and next, before moving on to our next unit.