Picture Books for Summarizing Stories

Picture books are a great way to help students summarize. After an engaging shared read, teachers and students together can work to summarize the story. This helps students to learn about how to find important events, which details to include (and which ones to skip!), and how to use academic language to write a skillful summary.

Can I Play Too? by Mo Willems is fun for readers of all ages. There is a problem presented in the story, an attempted solution that doesn't work at all (kids love this page), and a happy ending.

The combination of dialogue and pictures removes all temptation for kids to copy events from the text. Instead, they need to translate what happens on the page into new words. Perfect for summarizing!

With older students, this book is a great way to introduce theme and try to weave a theme into a summary. Would it be best to put the theme at the beginning? Or at the end?


Shortcut by Donald Crews is one book that I would not be able to teach without. I use it for so many things--personal narratives, character emotions, point of view, and summarizing. Like Can I Play Too?, the pictures carry a great deal of weight in the story. This book really shows the flatness of a summary versus a narrative as a finished summary of this book includes the main events, but carries none of the suspense and excitement of the original. This is definitely a book that you will love to have on your bookshelf.

Mole and the Baby Bird by Marjorie Newman looks as if it is meant for a very young reader. However, many readers can identify with the main character's desire to keep a wild bird as a pet. This is a good book to read with students who are struggling with how to represent dialogue in a summary. How can we translate the character's words into sentences? This book is also helpful to use to review the difference between summarizing and retelling. Many students identify so closely with the events in the book that they want to include every detail in a summary. Which events can be deleted, and why?

The King's Equal by Katherine Paterson is one of the first "magic books" that I shared with groups of children. I read it aloud to campers at bedtime during one of my three summers as a camp counselor...it was the perfect length to read a chapter each night. Written like a fairy tale, this story is a perfect length for chunk summarizing, or summarizing bits of a story at a time. Try writing a summary of each chapter with students. Then, at the end of the book, look at the chunk summaries all together. Do they represent the entire book? Would it be better to rewrite a summary of the text as a whole? These questions help readers to think deeply about how a story unfolds, and how to represent these plot complications in a summary. (I wrote an entire set of activities for this book--you can find it here.)

You can find more activities for summarizing stories in this unit, Summarizing Stories, from TeachersPayTeachers. For more on summarizing, check out my book, Summarizing, Paraphrasing, and Retelling.

What books do you like to use to teach summarizing stories?

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Retelling to Summarizing

Over the past few weeks, I've been working with some students on how to retell a text. What fun! But it's also given me the chance to think about how retelling is such an important foundation skill for summarizing. Here are some questions that I've been thinking about--and some of my partial answers.

Do readers need to be able to retell in order to write a good summary?

In general, I think that the answer is yes. Consider a student who reads a text and can't produce any ideas from the reading--or only a few scattered ideas, named out of order. Will that child be able to write a good summary? I doubt it. In order to select the most important ideas, a reader needs to be able to envision and work with most of the ideas from the text. Readers who have trouble recalling any ideas at all will flounder with the selection and synthesis that a summary requires.

This doesn't mean that kids who are struggling with retelling shouldn't be exposed to summarizing. In fourth grade, we don't have a moment to spare! But these readers will struggle with writing summaries on their own. Left to their own devices, they might fall into bad habits, like just copying sections of the text.

Instead, pull them into activities like choosing the best summary. Readers of all abilities can learn how to think about what makes a good summary. You could also try writing a group summary. Students provide the ideas or events, and you show them how to put them together into a summary. Another strategy that works well with struggling readers is sequencing events or information from the text. You give them the ideas (remember, this is the part that they struggle with), and they put the ideas in the order in which they appear in the text.

Are there any exceptions?
There are always exceptions, aren't there? That's what makes teaching reading so fun!

There is a small group of readers who will already be summarizing when you ask them to do a retelling. If you were to go by a retelling score alone (on the QRI or DRA), these readers might look like they are struggling. But the content of their retelling is markedly different from that of a struggling reader. When asked to retell, these readers may produce succinct versions of the text that put together ideas from various places into one nice neat package. Their "retellings" show an awareness of the main ideas of the text. (For example, if a student is retelling an episodic story, the student may collapse all of the episodes into one sentence.)

This is why scores and numbers don't tell the whole story. For these students, long and drawn out retellings are probably not necessary. They have already picked up the basics of summarizing by intuition. They would benefit from finding the best summary, sorting ideas as important or not important, and jumping into writing summaries.

Haven't I written about this before?
Um--yes. Quite a lot, as it happens. But with each new reader and new situation I find that I need to relearn and revisit what I already know. :)

Summarizing, Paraphrasing, and Retelling (my book)

Previous posts
Retelling or Summarizing?
Summarizing a Story
Summarizing Fiction with Elephant and Piggie
What Should a Good Retelling Include?

Summarizing Stories

Today, I worked with the reading strategy of summarizing. I used the Elephant and Piggie book Are You Ready to Play Outside? to model writing a summary. (I wrote about using Elephant and Piggie books for summarizing last May...this year, I decided to start early!) This book is very easy to read, but it makes a great quick introduction to writing a summary. Students can have success very quickly and write a great summary in just a few sentences.

Because, in summarizing, I've found that early success is key. If readers get mired in a summary of a text that is too difficult, they'll be tempted to use unproductive strategies, such as copy and delete. Even worse, they might decide to summarize only a part of the text instead of attacking the entire thing. A good summary of a text that is below a student's reading level is better than a poor summary of a harder text.

With Are You Ready to Play Outside, we read a few pages, and then put the action into a sentence. Students sat on the carpet with their notebooks and wrote along with me. For each part, I suggested a word that they could use--greet, unfortunately, however, until, finally. Some students used these words, while others branched out on their own.

"What did you learn about summarizing?" I asked students. One said, "I found out that we don't have to include everything. Which is hard, because there are sometimes funny bits that we want to put in." How true! Another student said, "There are different ways to say things." And, of course, someone had to add, "Elephants do make good friends." Which is definitely true!

Retelling in the Intermediate Grades

At a workshop last year, two teachers told me that their principal frowned upon retelling. Because they taught at the intermediate level, they said, their principal said that they should be focused more on summarizing, and less on retelling.

I think this is a misguided view that reflects assessment more than instruction. It's true that reading assessment in the intermediate grades focuses more on summarizing than retelling. On the DRA and the PSSA, students are asked to summarize instead of retell.

However, from an instructional viewpoint, retelling offers benefits for students of all levels. When students retell, they have to go beyond a surface level understanding of a text, delving deeper as they try to put ideas into their own words. Often, retelling will cause readers to generate new inferences and new ideas. Retelling requires some serious thinking!

Retelling is also an authentic activity. While adults don't often sit down to write summaries, they do often retell. What happened on that show last night? What is the twist ending to the movie? What went on at that faculty meeting? These conversations lead to retelling.

Many retelling materials are geared toward younger students. Older readers, however, need different scaffolds and different prompts. As stories become more sophisticated, students need to use words like "meanwhile" and "however" to explain the events. Students need to figure out how to explain events that happen from the point of view of one character only, how to deal with complex timelines, and how to explain information that one character knows, but other characters don't.

If you're starting out with retelling with intermediate students, I suggest starting with a short television show. Shows like "Word Girl" or "Phineas and Ferb" offer interesting plots in a very short time frame. These are a great shared experience to use as the basis for retelling. (What's interesting about "Phineas and Ferb" is that each episode contains two distinct storylines, which makes it a good challenge for students as they try to retell.)

As you move into text, it helps to give students something tangible to hold and move as they retell. Some students do not think about how characters move in time and space through the course of a story. Retelling with pictures or figures helps them to conceptualize this and "see" the story.

Here are some materials to support retelling:

Retelling Stories: Resources for Intermediate Students

Retold in 60 Seconds

The Magic Key