Teaching Summary with Google Slides and "SWBST"| #30DBB - Day 4

This is day 4 of "The 30 Day Blog Binge." Learn more

In the Texas ELAR state standards, there's a vein of higher level comprehension skills running through the grade levels that's lovingly referred to as Figure 19. The purpose of Figure 19 is to make sure that students have the tools to be able to comprehend literary (poetry, drama, fiction, etc.) and informational text (culture and history, expository, persuasive, etc.).

19E is the strand of Figure 19 that focuses on students being able to retell and summarize the major events of a text in a logical order. In high school, students are expected to be able to apply their understandings of Figure 19E in order to monitor their comprehension.

Here's the progression:

1. Kindergarten - retell or act out important evens in stories
2. 1st/2nd grade - retell or act out important events in stories in logical order
3. 3rd/4th grade - summarize information in text, maintaining meaning and logical order
4. 5th grade - summarize and paraphrase texts in ways that maintain meaning and logical order within a text and across texts
5. 6th-8th grade - summarize, paraphrase, and synthesize texts in ways that maintain meaning and logical order within a text and across texts
6. 9th-12th grade - reflect on understanding to monitor comprehension (e.g., asking questions, summarizing and synthesizing, making connections, creating sensory images) (Fig. 19A)

Google Slides and "SWBST"

Google Slides provides the perfect way for students to practice and visualize summarization, using a strategy called "Somebody-Wanted-But-So-Then" (sometimes there's a "Finally" tacked on to the end of it.) Students use the SWBST structure to identify the main character, conflict and resolution of a story, sequence them correctly, and then use the structure to write a summary paragraph. SWBST works with everything from fairy tales to Pixar movies to full novels. It's an incredibly powerful framework for identifying the core elements of a story.

A Slides template pushed out through Google Classroom provides students the SWBST framework to work with. By assigning the template in Classroom and setting it to "Every students gets a copy," students can find images using Google Slides handy Research tool and complete the sentence stems on each slide to create their summary.

Check out the "Little Red Riding Hood" example below, then make a copy of the template to use with your students. Happy summarizing!

#30DBB