Summary template

Summarising is an important skill to practise regularly with students. It also teaches students to take notes and identify key points. 

The question words are a good starting point to identify the main ideas in a text. Not all question words are relevant, and we need to support students to be selective when working on summarising.  

This template can be used to summarise a paragraph, short text or longer text. 

It can be introduced during whole-class reading instruction (shared reading) so that you can explicitly model summarising and guide students to complete the template.

Check out our other retelling and summarising resources.