Summarizing in Layers

Get Ready

A long story is too big to summarize in one go. Build the summary in layers instead.

Today’s story

The Year Without a Summer

A true story from 1816. About 280 words.

Words to know

harvestThe crops a farm picks at the end of the growing season.
sulfurA yellow material that makes a thick, smelly gas when it burns.
sunspotsDark patches that come and go on the sun.

Read and Answer

Read one page. Then answer the question in the yellow box.

Page 1 of 3

The eruptionIn April 1815, a volcano called Tambora blew itself apart. Tambora is on an island in what is now Indonesia. It was the biggest eruption anyone had ever recorded. People heard the blast sixteen hundred miles away.

The eruption threw huge clouds of ash and sulfur high into the sky. They went higher than the clouds where rain forms. Because rain could not wash it out, a thin veil of dust spread around the whole planet. It stayed there for months and bounced some of the sunlight back into space.

A summer that did not comeThe next year, 1816, was cold everywhere. In June, snow fell in New England. In Vermont, frost killed the corn in July and again in August. In Europe, it rained all summer, and the harvest rotted in the fields.

Why summarize part by part instead of from memory?

Page 2 of 3

Food prices rose faster than anyone could remember. In Switzerland, hungry families ate moss and boiled weeds. In New England, thousands of people left their farms. They walked west, looking for land that had not failed.

Nobody knew whyNobody at the time connected any of this to a volcano on the other side of the world. Newspapers blamed sunspots, or lightning rods, or people behaving badly. The link to Tambora was not fully worked out until more than a hundred years later.

Page 3 of 3

The cold year had one strange result that had nothing to do with food. Beside a lake in Switzerland, a group of writers was stuck indoors by the endless rain. To pass the time, they agreed that each of them would write a ghost story. One of them was Mary Shelley, who was eighteen. The story she began that wet summer became the famous book Frankenstein.

Read It All

Answer all the questions to open the whole story.

My Notebook

Finish the story first. Then write two things you noticed.

What You Learned

Write one sentence for each part first.
Then shrink those sentences into two or three.
Read the whole story again and ask what got lost.

For the grown-up

Long summaries fail because children try to do them in one pass and end up recording whatever was memorable. Layering — a sentence per section, then a summary of those sentences — replaces memory with method, and it scales to a chapter or a whole book.

For a book chapter, try one sentence per section on paper first. The final summary almost writes itself.