Who says summary writing tasks have to be boring? My class don’t love summaries but they did love this lesson.
The aims of this lesson were set by my students after filling in the ‘POST’ side of their post-mocks exam wrappers. They wanted to be more confident in identifying the key points in a text, paraphrasing, and organising their summaries. So this is what we did:
The students paired up and gave their team a name. They must then come up with a buzzer sound that relates to their name. (They liked that.)
I showed the instructions part of the task only on the board, so the students know what they’re looking for. (I used a past paper CIE Winter 2018 21)
Buzzer check (important)
ROUND 1- identifying points
I read the text aloud. The students listened and ‘buzzed’ when they heard a point they thought was relevant. In the case of a task like this one where there are 2 “headings” in the task, I would ask them which one it falls under. I also recommend asking them when they knew the point was coming. My students notably started pricking their ears up at key indicator words and even buzzed in early quite a lot– it can be useful to point out what they are doing here and how it can help them when they do the task in the normal fashion.)
Teams score a mark for a correct buzz. We discussed why any wrong buzzes missed the mark.
When I’d finished reading, they’d got all the points, and we had a winning team. For now!
ROUND 2 – paraphrasing race
Students continued to work in their teams. I had cut up the points they’d found in the text into slips. Each team started with point 1 (they are in a random order) and were told they had to write a good sentence paraphrasing that point. A timer was set for 9 minutes.
When they had done it, they showed it to me. If it was good, I gave them slip number 2. If not, they kept trying. Teacher’s decision is final!
When the timer went off, teams counted up the number of sentences they appropriately paraphrased, and this number ass added to their team’s total. The overall winner was then announced (it wasn’t the same team as the in the first round).
NEXT STAGE – organising
Students were asked what else they needed to think about when writing a summary. I elicited a brief topic sentence (paraphrasing the task), organising points logically, and the use of suitable linkers. I offered handouts on both.
AND FINALLY – putting it all together
At this point I handed out the summary text and asked students to write their summary.
Click HERE to download all the materials I used.
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