Whew! Who’s ready for some very low- or no-prep homeschool activities? This year is already wearing me out, and we have only been in our “school year” for a month, so I definitely know the feeling!

I’ve been trying to come up with easy, consistent habits to build that help us all find a routine in this new normal. I also now have a fourth grader, which for us has flagged a sense of more formal practice in some of the foundational language arts skills.

What are “foundational language arts skills”? Well, as an English professor, I think of these as the skills that are at the very core of being able to communicate clearly, interact with external sources of information, and demonstrate comprehension. Something that hits every single one of those is summary.

Why Summary Matters

You may not spend a lot of time thinking about summary. It’s often tossed in as a kind of quick hit on the way to a larger project. “Summarize this chapter” before a big test or “give a summary of the passage” as a single multiple choice question.

When you really stop to think about it, though, summary is a much more complex skill than it often gets credit for being. In order to accurately summarize something, you must first understand it. There’s no faking it. If you don’t understand it, it will show in your summary.

Even once comprehension is achieved, the work of summary calls upon the skills of attention and curation. In order to meaningfully and accurately summarize something, the reader must

1. Understand what it is they read/watched
2. Consider what ideas are most relevant
3. Take on the perspective of an unfamiliar audience
4. Curate the content that is most meaningful to that audience
5. Craft the message in a way that is organized and clear

Those are foundational skills. Learners will need to call upon them throughout their entire academic, professional, and personal lives. The ability to take in information, consider it from someone else’s perspective, and communicate the key parts back in a succinct, ethical, and meaningful way is a crucial life skill.

Luckily for us pandemic homeschoolers, it’s also something you can practice with virtually no prep work.

Auxiliary Skills

In addition to the foundational language arts skills I’ve listed above, there are a few other skills that practicing summary can help build (and, if these are major goals, you can design your activities to focus on them even more).

• Active Listening– When learners summarize something like a podcast, television show, video clip, or film, they have to practice active listening skills.
• Annotation– When learners summarize something written, they can practice the skill of annotating the text to help identify key points and relevant quotes.
• Note-taking– No matter what form the original text is in, learners who need to summarize it will benefit from taking notes, and the more they practice, the better they’ll get at doing it well.
• Handwriting– This is a struggle in our house, but summaries are often short and provide contextualized handwriting practice.
• Public Speaking– Summaries that are delivered aloud (either in person or via video or audio recordings) provide practice in elocution.
• Technical Skills– Summaries delivered via video or audio offer a chance to practice the technical skills of recording and editing these multimedia formats.
• Organization– Regardless of the form, summaries must be arranged in a logical order to make sense to an audience, so creating one helps practice key organization skills.

How to Practice Summary

Here’s the great thing about adding intentional summary practice into your homeschool: it can be used in conjunction with your learner’s interests. Almost anything can become a source for a summary assignment: books, magazine articles, documentaries, TV shows, online videos.

My advice is to start with something relatively short and build up to longer works over time.

Summaries can be written (a paragraph or two is usually sufficient unless it’s a very long work), recorded, or performed as an in-person speech (1-2 minutes is a good goal for most shorter texts).

In addition, make a habit of pointing out summary when you encounter it “in the wild.” You’ll hear it often in news reports. One of my favorite podcasts is This Movie Changed Me, and they start every episode with a quick summary of the film. Once you’re looking for them, you’ll find summaries all over the place.

Sources for Summaries

Okay, I know I said you can summarize anything (and you can, really!), but I also know it’s nice to have some real clear places to go to get started.

Video sources

• History 101– a series of 20-minute mini documentaries about different historical perspectives on things like fast food, nuclear power, plastics, and feminism. These are the perfect length for early summary practice. (Available on Netflix)
• The Toys that Made Us– this documentary series is longer (45-minute episodes), so it will probably require more note-taking skills. Each episode takes a deep dive into the history of a particular toy. (Available on Netflix)
• How It’s Made– This documentary series includes 20-minute episodes, but each one contains multiple topics, so it could be a good source for shorter summary practice. (Available on Hulu; some full episodes available online)
• TED Talks– TED Talks are perfect for this practice because you can find them in a variety of lengths and on just about any subject.

Text sources

• Smithsonian Magazine– Wide range of science- and history-focused articles that are typically long enough to make for a meaningful summary exercise.
• Scientific American– Another source of science-focused articles that tend to be written accessibly and in a length manageable for middle school and up.
• NPR– I find NPR’s articles good for summarizing, especially those from the Art & Design, Pop Culture, and Food categories.
• An encyclopedia entry or a page/section from a nonfiction informational text. We have these all over my house, but we don’t use them as much as I’d like. This is a great way to both use the resources we already have on hand and practice this important skill.
• Almost any news site. Pick a local or national one. If you have an older learner, have them summarize two (or more) articles on the same subject from different organizations, which will help them see how reporting differs among them.

A Few Tips

What I love about summary assignments is that you don’t need to prep them ahead of time. You don’t even need to have read it before your learner. In fact, it might be better if you don’t have any familiarity with it. That way they can test their summarizing skills on a real unfamiliar audience.

I do have a few tips for helping these activities go more smoothly:

• Mix it up– Don’t just make your learner write a paragraph after every episode of a documentary series. They’ll get bored. You’ll get bored. Everyone will get bored. Mix it up. Sometimes it can be a paragraph. Sometimes it can be a video. Younger writers might even draw pictures to summarize the points they remember. They’re still building the skills.
• Don’t strive for perfection– The goal here is to build great language arts habits. Summary is, despite its simplistic appearance, really hard to do well. The best way to improve it is to practice, practice, practice. Don’t strive for perfection on any specific attempt. Just keep building on the skills and you’ll see improvement over time. Along the same lines, I advise not making these a place where you focus closely on grammar and punctuation rules. The content and organization matter most.

Assessment

If you want to check to make sure that your learner is meeting the goals of summary, you can use this simple rubric to evaluate their summaries.

Category	Yes	No
The summary gives the main idea of the original near the beginning and in clear language.
There are specific examples that help illustrate how the main point was supported.
The summary avoids going off on tangents that are disconnected from the main idea.
The summary avoids inserting the author’s opinion or personal observations about the topic.

If you prefer, here’s a kid-friendly version for younger writers.

Category	Yes	No
I get to the point quickly.
I’ve used examples from what I read/watched so that someone who doesn’t know about it would understand.
I stick to the topic.
I don’t put in my own opinion or stories from my life.