Start-Up Activity

Have students page through a typical chapter (or a section from a chapter) from either a science or social studies textbook. Tell them that the subject of this All Write chapter—writing a summary—will help them remember the main ideas from their other academic texts. Then ask a volunteer to read page 181 of All Write aloud. In your discussion of this page, it might be helpful to compare the summary of a written text to the box score of a baseball game, which serves as a summary of the game. Ask students if they can think of comparable summaries (recipes, parts of manuals, brief reviews, etc.).