Summarizing Worksheets

A summary tells the most important ideas of a text in a few sentences, in your own words. It is much shorter than the text, and it leaves out small details and opinions. For a story, a good summary answers a few questions: who is the main character, what does the character want, what gets in the way, and how does it end? For nonfiction, a summary starts with the main idea of the whole text and adds two or three key details that support it.

A summary is not the same as a retelling. A retelling tells almost everything that happens, in order, with lots of details: "First, Amara hung up her green coat. Then she looked in her backpack, and her library book was gone. She looked under her desk and behind the bookshelf..." A summary of the same story might be just two sentences: "Amara could not find her library book, so she searched the school with her friend. Her little brother had packed it by mistake, and she returned it on time."

These pages build the skill one step at a time. Children start with an anchor chart and a summary-or-retelling sort, then choose the best summary of short original stories and nonfiction texts, cross out sentences that do not belong, and finally write their own summaries with graphic organizers.

Every text is original and written for 4th graders, and every page with a right answer comes with an answer key.