Reading to Learn Design | ctrdlessondesigns

Time to sum it up!

Reading to Learn

Summarization

By: Julie Clark

Rationale:

Once students have learned to read accurately and fluently, they will move on to the next step in reading, the most important goal of reading comprehension is reading to learn. In the lesson, students will learn strategies on how to summarize. Students will have the opportunity to practice their summarization skills after reading the whole text.

Materials:

-Pencils

-Paper

-Dry erase markers

-Highlighters

-Comprehension questions

-Class set of “Honeybee Mystery”

-Class set of “Polar Bears Listed as Threatened”

-Poster of “The Secret Language of Dolphins”

-Rubric for grading

Procedures:

“Hello class! Today we are going to be learning how to summarize an article. Summarizing is going to help you better comprehend what you read. What do you think it means to summarize? Yes! Summarization is when you read a passage or piece of text and take all the small details so that you are left with the main idea of the text. So lets review some things we learned about reading first. Then, we will talk more about what it means to summarize as well as some of the rules of summarizing.”
Start the lesson by reviewing some of the vocabulary in the article. Say: “Today we are going to be reading an article about dolphins. In the article, we will find new words. Before we start reading, I want to introduce and define words so when we read them, we will understand what they mean. The words I am going to explain are: gesture, elusiveness, scuffle, nuance.” Define each word in the following way:

-The first word is gesture. A gesture is a movement of part of the body that is used to help express an idea or meaning. Now, I will use it in a sentence. The woman on the sidewalk gestured for a taxicab. It could be used in this way- “After the softball game, Sally’s dad gave her a thumbs up for doing a great job”. Gesture would not be the same if I used it like this- “Evan gestured at Ryan by looking at him”. This doesn’t really work because Evan is trying to describe an entire idea as opposed to using a gesture to help express his idea. Ryan can’t read Evan’s mind, so he must use words or a gesture to help explain what he is trying to say. A gesture, again, is any movement that can convey the meaning to someone else. For example- a thumb’s up; by doing this to someone, they understand what you mean without having to use words. Now, let’s see if we can figure out what gesture may have been used in this next sentence. If Evan is leaving his friend Ryan, what might the gesture be in this situation? Great! Evan would wave goodbye, which would be gesturing himself leaving. Now that you have a better understanding of the word gesture, let’s try and come up with our own sentence using that word.

Next, we will explain and display the poster with the summarization rules. Talk about each of the rules one by one before practicing them in a real paragraph. Explain just how each rule is going to help them summarize in their reading.
Read the following paragraph from “The Secret Language of Dolphins” to the students and model how to summarize. Say: “Here is a paragraph from an article from National Geographic Kids called ‘The Secret Language of Dolphins’. I am going to read this paragraph aloud. Please follow along silently as I read. ‘In many ways, you are just like the more than 30 species of dolphins that swim in the world’s oceans and rivers. Dolphins are mammals, like you are, and must swim to the surface to breathe air. Just as you might do, they team up in groups, accomplish tasks. ‘Now let’s look at this paragraph. Our first rule tells us to get rid of unimportant information so I’m going to take my maker and cross out the unimportant information. Next, we are going to cross out the entire first sentence. It’s good to know that there are many different species of dolphins but that isn’t really something important to dolphin’s language. Now we are going to get rid of repeated information. Since there is no repeated information in this paragraph, we can move to the next rule; which is making an “umbrella” for some of our words. We are going to make an umbrella with the words “and they are smart”. We are going to “umbrella” the sentence within the second sentence to where it says, “Dolphins are smart mammals”. So let’s take our highlighter and mark “and they’re smart” and “dolphins are mammals”. Let’s also highlight “swim to the surface to breathe air” in the second sentence and “they team up in groups to accomplish tasks” in there third sentence. We will umbrella those sentences into one as well. Our next rule says to select a topic sentence. Our topic is going to be dolphins. For our topic sentence, I am going to write, “Dolphins are smart mammals that swim to the surface to breather air and they team up in groups to accomplish tasks.
Say: “Now that you see how we are summarizing, I am going to give you each a copy of an article called, “Polar Bears Listed As Threatened”. I want you to try to summarize on your own, but I will be here to help if needed. Did you know that those sweet looking polar bears are in the top ten deadliest to man list? This article will discuss more about why Polar Bears have made the “threatened” list. To find out more about these amazing creatures and what is being done to help save them, read the article. Read it independently to yourself and use your marker and highlighters to do the same thing we just did together. Once you have read through and made your check marks, we will go over what we all believe the information we need to summarize. Lastly, I would like you all to get out a piece of paper and a pencil and write a sentence on the summarized information.
Say: “Now that you have had my help in understanding how to summarize two different articles, I would like you all to try and apply your new skills by yourself. You will be reading “Honeybee Mystery”. As you read, do as we have before and highlight our underline the important information as well as delete the unimportant or repeated information. After you have finished reading, review the highlighted or underlined information and make a sentence combining all of the important details. To help you decide what is important, ask yourself, ‘What is this about?’ and ‘What is the point of the article?’. This should help you determine what to include in your summary.”

Assessment: For the assessment part, I will be using the summarization rules checklist. Students will be evaluated on their ability to correctly use the summarization rules and strategies to get rid of unimportant or repeated information and make a short summary of what they have read. I will also ask the students questions such as “What are some things you learned about the honeybees?” and “Where do they usually live?” and “Why are bee’s important to us?”

Summarization Rules: