Reading to Learn
Stomping Into Summarization
Reading to Learn Design
Rationale:
The goal of reading is for students to comprehend what they read. In order to become better readers, we must truly understand what we are reading. One way to for beginning readers to improve comprehension is to learn how to summarize. To summarize is to take all the important details and main ideas out of a text and combine them in a way that explains the story. Basically, summarization is where you find an umbrella term for the events that happen in the text. This lesson helps students learn how to find main ideas and key details in a text by having the teacher model summarization and then by summarizing themselves. The teacher will show the strategy of summarizing by explicitly modeling how to pick out important details and eliminate unimportant ones, and then guide students through summarizing their own passages. The students will be assessed on their summarization skills through comprehension questions.
Materials:
1. Rules written on the white board:
· take out minor details
· find an umbrella term for the events that happen in the text
· write a sentence that tells what the text is about
1. Paper for each student
2. Pencil for each student
3. Highlighter for each student
4. Class copies of “Into the Wild”
5. Bookmark that has summarization rules
Procedures:
1. Say: “Raise your hand if you have ever read a book that you thought was so interesting that you wanted to tell someone about it. When you told them did you tell them only the important parts of the book? If so, that is called summarization.”
1. Say: “Now that you all are becoming fluent readers, we need to learn a new skill to help with reading comprehension. The strategy we are going to be working on is summarization. Summarization, like mentioned before, is understanding the main ideas in a text. It helps us look at the important facts, rather than the whole text. We are going to look at an article so that we understand the main points of the article. As we summarize, we are going to be focusing on the main idea, looking at facts that support this idea, and what information we can take out.”
1. Say: “In order to successfully summarize, we must understand these three rules. (Point to rules written on the white board and have students copy down). Rule one, mark out any unnecessary or repeated information. Can anyone tell me how they know what unnecessary information would be? Right! It is information that doesn’t pertain to the main idea. Rule two, find an umbrella term for the events that happen in the text. The last rule is to form a sentence to represent the main idea from what you highlighted.”
1. Say: “Now that we know our key strategies for helping us summarize, we can begin to look at an article to practice summarizing. I am going to show you how I would do these steps of summarization with a short article about Elephants that we are reading today!” (Book talk: How many of you have ever been to a zoo and seen an Elephant? Elephants are the largest land animals on the planet! Why do you think they travel in large groups? Did you know that the trunk of an elephant helps them eat, drink, and smell? We are going to read just how exciting these amazing creatures are).
Say: “In order to summarize and understand what we are reading, it is important to make sure we know what all the words in the passage mean. We are going to go over a few words together that you will see in the article that we are going to read today. For each word please make sure you right the word, its definition, and the sentence used. [for each word explain the word in simple language, model how to use the word” (what doesn’t it mean?), provide sample questions using the word, and scaffold by making a sentence using the word for students to complete.] For example, “let’s look at one of the vocabulary words, flexible. Flexible means something that is able to bend easily without breaking. The word is used in the passage, “Elephants are known for their long, flexible trunks.” Which of these is an example of flexible: “Snakes are flexible.” OR “The sky is flexible." Right! “Snakes are flexible” is correct because snakes are also flexible, just like an elephants trunk. Now that we know what flexible means, can you see how it fits into the sentence? What other flexible things can you think of?” (repeat modeling process for the remaining vocabulary words). Vocabulary words: flexible, safari, mammal
1. Say: “As I pass out to you the articles we are going to summarize today, take another look out our summarization rules that are on the board and make sure they are copied down correctly.” Once everything is passed out and the students have everything copied down, begin the lesson.
1. Say: “Who can tell me, based off the rules, what they think we should do first if we want to summarize this article? Right! Highlight the most important information. Let’s look at the first paragraph and see if we can start the process of summarization. We first highlight all important sentences. Once we highlight the important sentences, we can go back and mark the ones that were not as important.” (Explain why you highlighted and marked out certain sentences when modeling the paragraph below).
Elephants are huge. They are the largest land animals on Earth. They roam through parts of Africa and Asia. Join TFK on an elephant safari. Let’s learn about these incredible mammals.
Elephants travel together in large groups called herds. A herd is made up of females and young elephants. The grown-up elephants work together to take care of the young.
1. Say: “Now all of your articles should look like mine. Now that we have everything highlighted and crossed out, we are going to form a topic sentence based off our highlighted information.” (Write sentence on board for students to refer to) “Elephants are large land animals that travel in herds and work together to take care of the young.”
1. Say: “We are going to continue this process for each paragraph of this article. Now that we have practiced this together, I want you to continue to work individually on this task. I want you to pick out some important facts and highlight them and cross out anything that is not as important. Once you are done and have found the most important facts in each paragraph, you can start to put all the sentences together to make your own one, big paragraph. This paragraph is your summary!
1. As students finish, have them turn in their article and summary for a grade. Tell them to pick up a comprehension question exit slip that they will fill out as well. The exit slip will consist of the following questions: 1. Do elephants travel in Herds? 2. What mammal is larger than an elephant? 3. What can an elephant use its trunk for? 4. How do elephants beat the heat? 5. What do you think the author intended the purpose of the article to be? Have students turn in their annotated article and a summary and grade as form of assessment. The rubric used:
Summary rubric:
_____ Student underlined/highlighted important ideas (Yes or No)
_____ Student crossed out unimportant detail (Yes or No)
_____ Summary used 1+ complete sentences in their summary (Yes or No)
_____ Student identified topics accurately in summary (Yes or No)
_____ Student included key ideas in summary (Yes or No)
Comprehension Question Exit Slip:
1. Do elephants travel in Herds?
2. What mammal is larger than an elephant?
3. What can an elephant use its trunk for?
4. How do elephants beat the heat?
5. What do you think the author intended the purpose of the article to be?
References
Time for Kids Article
https://www.timeforkids.com/k1/into-the-wild-3/
Claire Payne, Swimming into Summarization
https://claire3129.wixsite.com/mysite-1/reading-to-learn
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