Having a summary of a chapter can really help a homeschool student quickly recap everything that it contains. Writing a good summary involves paraphrasing all the important ideas contained in a text. With a little bit of help and guidance from the homeschooling parent, a student can begin to write good summaries consistently.Tell them the following tips to help them come up with fast and good summaries.
Highlight or Underline
How often is it that you know you have read something in the text the first time, but can’t seem to find that statement when you speed read through it again at a later date? Besides being irritating, it is also a huge time waster, but it has a simple solution. The first time you read a text and something happens to strike you, just mark it. You can highlight what caught your eye or simply underline it with a pencil. The idea is that the bits that stood out can be found easily when you come back to read the text again.
Reread the Text
Once you have finished reading the whole chapter or lesson, take a short break. Focus on something else for a while. If you don’t have much time to waste before you begin to write your summary, simply get up and go drink a glass of water. Now come back and reread the text paying special attention to the bits that you have marked out before. This helps in better assimilation of the text as a whole, and also allows you to filter out the truly important points that you would like to add to your written summary.
Write Self Explanatory Notes
While writing down what is written in the book is a simple way to put a summary together, it may not be as effective as paraphrasing. That is to say that you read the sentence in the book, understand the meaning, and then re-write in in your own words. This ensures that there is no scope for doubt. It also serves as self explanatory notes for the subject when you are studying for a test at a later date.
