Let's Have a Summary Ball!

 

With summer just around the corner, what a perfect time to read a story about the sun, sand, and beach! Kay S. Heath is a retired teacher and local author that has written several delightful children’s books. Her book, Three Little Frogs Go to the Beach,  is a charming story of Momma frog and her three baby frogs. Momma wants to take the young frogs on an adventure for the day to explore the beach. At the beach, the frogs see many things they have never seen before, including humans. They observe the people playing on the beach and in the ocean, and building sand castles and frog huts. Momma frog explains all the things that the people are doing like wearing sunglasses and hats, putting on sunscreen, and sitting under large umbrellas to protect them from the sun. When the day was done, the young frogs were excited about what they had learned on their journey, but mostly, they were very pleased to simply be frogs.

This is a wonderful story to correlate with teaching students how to summarize. An activity that can be done with this book, and any other book read to children, is called a Summary Ball. The teacher would first take a beach ball and write the words Who, What, When, Where, How, and Why on each of the panels of the beach ball. After reading a story, the students will toss the ball around; each student that catches the ball must read the question word that is closest to their right thumb. If the question is:

Who? - the students must describe the characters that were in the story.

What? - students must summarize what all major events happened in the story.

When? - the students must tell the class when this story took place.

Where? - students must describe where the story took place (setting).

How? - students must summarize how the characters reacted in the story or how the characters came to a conclusion at the end of the story.

Why? - the students must tell why the characters acted as they did or did what they did within the story.
 

 

As the students are describing and summarizing what all happens in the book, the teacher writes down the answers to all of the Who, What, When, Where, How, and Why questions on the board for all of the students to view. Afterwards, students will do the same thing at their desk while making a chart with all the questions on it and filling it in independently. This is a great activity to use for summarizing because it gives every student a chance to tell what they learned. It is also a great tool because there are more students than questions, so students get to add more than one detail per question.
After this activity has been practiced in the classroom a few times, the students will hopefully remember the Summary Ball activity and the questions on the ball to help them with future summarizing.