Five-Sentence Summary Graphic Organizer

This two-page graphic organizer helps students organize their thoughts and write a clear, well-structured five-sentence summary of a fiction or nonfiction text. Many students struggle to include the most important details in their summaries, or these details are not presented in a logical order. This document breaks down the task of writing a summary into smaller tasks, beginning with identifying the who, what, where, when, and why of the story.

This document contains two pages. The first page asks students to identify who the story was about, what happened in the story, when the story happened, where the story happened, and why the events in the story happened. Also on the first page, students can demonstrate their understanding of the text by drawing a picture with a caption.

The second page helps students to organize their summary into a logically sequenced five-sentence paragraph that begins with a topic sentence and ends with a concluding sentence. Students should use the left side of the page to write full sentences for each prompt. Then, students can recopy their sentences neatly onto the lines on the right side of the page for a complete paragraph.

Teachers can use both pages of the document to help students show a thorough understanding of the text, or they can use each page individually. Some teachers may even choose to cut apart the organizers to further individualize their instruction.

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