Can you put that in your own words?

Summarising; "Telling it the short way"

During the past two weeks the year one students have been taking part in reading workshops that focus their attention on the important skill of summarising what they read, or as one of the students said "Telling it in a short way"!  
 Summarising is important as it transfers what the author is telling us into our own words, and in so doing we are re-creating the author's message for ourselves. We used two different thinking routines to practice this skill.

• The first is "Headlines".  After reading a story and discussing it at length, the students were asked to create two headlines; one that matched the story and one that did not. 
• The second routine is "Story Mapping".  This is one way of re-telling a story which is especially appropriate to those tales that involve a journey.  The students were asked to select the most important events in the story and create a map or series of pictures to re-tell the story. 

Below are some examples of both routines.  The children were asked to take home their story map of "Biblioburro" and retell the story to their parents...