Writing Summaries

The new Common Core state assessments will require every student K-12 to be able to write a summary. This will be different from past tests in a number of important ways. Students will be required to summarize a nonfiction text. This text will be either a science or a social studies passage. The text will be written at the high end of the the grade level spectrum. And, here's the kicker, the writing tests will be given in February to allow time for the tests to be hand scored. This means that your students will need to be reading at the high end of their grade level several months before the end of the school year. This is going to require you to seriously speed up your time schedule.

There are a number of good online resources on teaching summarization.

If your students are going to be able to read these higher level texts, they are going to need to have their phonics skills down perfectly. This means that they will need to know all the major phonics patterns, not just some of them. They will need to be able to apply these patterns when sounding out multiple syllable words, and they will need to be able to read with fluency.