Shaun Pluta's Text Set for Summarizing and Synthesizing

How I Became a Pirate by Melinda Long and David Shannon

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Long, Melinda, and David Shannon. How I Became a Pirate. New York: Harcourt Children's Books, 2003.

Synopsis: This is an imaginary tale where a young boy named Jeremy Jacob is spending a day with his family on the beach. All of a sudden a pirate ship comes along the shore and whisks Jeremy away to spend a day as a pirate. Along the way Jeremy learns to do things like talk like a pirate, eat like a pirate, and even gets the chance to bury some treasure. Jeremy loved spending the day with the pirates. The pirates say that Jeremy is welcome back anytime, but for right now he is ready to go back to his normal life... and to soccer practice.

Strategy Connection: In focusing on summarizing and synthesis, I would probably have the students do one of two things with this story. Having the students do as i did with the synopsis would demonstrate what the two skills are used for, but there are more interesting ways to engage the students so that the learn the lesson. For this story a good activity would be for the students to choose one to two sentences from each page of the story, and retell it. If the story still makes sense, they are doing a good job of synthesizing by shortening the story and summarizing picking out the most important details.





The Bug Cemetery by Frances Hill and Illustrated by Vera Rosenberry

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Hill, Frances, and Vera Rosenberry. The Bug Cemetery. Boston: Henry Holt & Company Books For Young Readers, 2002.

Synopsis: This book is about a group of children that find a dead ladybug and decide to bury it, and make a headstone out of a rock that they decorate. Before long, all of the neighborhood kids want to join in the fun of burying dead insects and having funerals for them. The funerals are full of speeches and fake tears. At the end of the story, one of the childrens cats really dies and they have to have a real funeral. The students began crying real tears and they realize that "Funerals are not fun when they are for people that you love."

Strategy Connection: This book is very short but has a lot of good functions. As it is short I feel that it would be very good for mental sumarizing and synthesizing. In order to do this i would have student read through the story and do a mental retelling, where they write down the story as best they could remember it in their own words. By doing this, I would point out to the children that more often the not the parts of the story that they left in their story are very important. Students use these important sections in order to make sense out of the story. This essentially is sumarizing and synthesizing.

Dr. Laura Schlessinger's Why do you Love Me?

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Schlessinger, Laura, Martha L. Lambert, and Paul Meisel. Why Do You Love Me? New York: HarperCollins, 1999.

Synopsis: This is the story of a little boy named Sammy. Throughout this story Sammy is trying to figure out why it is that his mother loves him. Is it because he is good at Karate, because he helps others? Are there times when Sammys mother does not love him like when he screams, or after he hits someone? It must be because of these things that Sammy's mother loves him. In the end Sammy's mother reassures him that she loves him all the time, good or bad, because he is hers and there is only one of him.

Strategy Connection: This book is full of important material and other material that could left out when retelling the story. This book would be great for students to begin to learn how to synthesize and sumarrize by figuring out how to draw out important details. For this book I would have the student read the story. Following, I would have prepared a worksheet with different sections of the story. The students job is to selcect the passages that are most vital to retelling the story. This builds on their skills and helps to refine their reading.