Summing It Up
Reading to Learn
Rationale:
Comprehension
is one of the most important and essential aspects of reading. Summarization is
a great way to assess students’ comprehension; by having, children recall the
important points from a passage or story. However, until students are provided
with instruction on how to summarize, many find it difficult to construct
summaries on their own. This lesson will teach children how to summarize by
deleting trivial and redundant information and to find or create a topic
sentence that highlights the main ideas of the story.
Materials:
Copies of National Geographic Online Mighty Oaks Recover After Hurricane
Katrina for each student. This can be found at:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/kids/2005/11/trees.html
Pencil for each student
Paper for each student
Expo markers
Dry Erase Board
A
bookmark for each student with the 5 summarization steps on it
Summarization steps:
1.
Pick out important details that are necessary to the story.
2.
Pick out the less important or repeated ideas from the passage and
eliminate them.
3.
Highlight the important and necessary details using key words.
4.
Pick a topic sentence
5.
Invent a topic sentence if there is none.
Procedures
1.
Introduce the lesson by asking students, “Who thinks they can tell me
what the word ‘comprehension’ means?
Very good! Comprehension is
when we understand what we are reading.
Sometimes, we try to read a book so fast that we forget to pay attention
to what the story is all about.
Today we are going to learn a new strategy, or helpful hint, that will help us
with comprehension. The strategy we
are going to talk about today is kind of a big word, but many of you may have
already heard it. This strategy is
called summarization. Who thinks
they know what this word means?
Very good! Summarization is when we
‘sum up’ or give the important details from a story.
Using this strategy will help us to eliminate the less important
information and help us remember what is important so that we can ‘comprehend’
what we are reading.”
"There are five main steps that we are going to talk about that will help us
remember our new strategy of summarization."
[Write steps on board for students to see]
5 Steps to Summarization
1.
Pick out important details that are necessary to the story.
2.
Point out and remove less important details.
3.
Choose keywords to help remember the important details.
4.
Put keywords in order of when they occurred in the story.
5.
Put all important details and keywords into one main topic sentence.
3.
“Okay boys and girls, now that we have talked about our strategy I think
we are ready to see how it works!”
I want you to read the first passage, Elephant Camp. Elephant Camp is about
Elephants that get sent to a camp and have to do something because they become
very tired. I wonder what they have to do? Let's read to find out silently to
yourselves, and then we will use our new strategy to summarize what we have just
read. Remember to be paying
attention to the details as you read Elephant Camp, don’t just read it quickly
to get done.”
4.
After the children finish reading, work together as a class to model
using the new strategy. “We are
going to use the 5 steps to summarization that we just learned.
Give the students an example of an important fact to get them thinking in
the right direction. Now, who can
tell me one main fact that they remember from the article?
Very good!” [List facts given by students on one side of the board]
Be sure to model facts for the students to prompt their thinking.
Modeling: [Fact: Elephants
in India will be going to camp.]
“Now we are going to move on to step #2, who can tell me what details of this
story are not important to the main topic?
Very good!” [List facts
given by students on one side of the board]
Continue to model for students.
Modeling: [Unimportant information: The name of the exact city,
remembering the country will be enough.]
Continue with step #3.
“Let’s try and think of keywords that will help us remember
this article. [List keywords
on board] Modeling: [Keywords:
Elephants, working, camp, rest]
Very good! Only two more steps to
go. Step #4, let’s organize our
keywords. Say, "The word organize means to make
neat or to put in order from first to last." Say, Hear is a sentence, I
organized my books by abc order. Now you try. Take volunteers to give you a
sentence. We will put the keywords in order by when they were mentioned
in the article. Modeling: [List
keywords on board in chronological order] Now it is time for our last step, step
#5. We are going to try and combine
all of these important details and keywords that we have written on the board”
[point to the several lists that have been made on the board].
Encourage students that there is not a right and wrong answer.
There are several possibilities for topic sentences; all children do not
have to have the same one. Model
this heavily so that they can see how to leave out information that might not be
as relevant and some of the other stuff.
It may be necessary for the teacher to suggest a topic sentence.
5.
“We have now gone through the 5 steps to summarization and I hope you all
understand how to use each of these steps.
I am going to give you another article and I want you to practice using
those summarization skills to summarize this article.
The article is called, “Bears and People: Learning to Live Together.”
Read the article to yourselves.
Keep in mind the things we talked about.
I am going to pass out bookmarks that have the 5 steps listed on them for
you to keep to help you remember the steps.
6.
When the children begin to finish their article, instruct them to get out
paper and pencil to begin writing down responses to each of the 5 steps like we
did as a class. “I want you to go
back through the article recalling the important facts, the not so important
details, forming keywords, putting the keywords in order and finally creating a
topic sentence that will sum up the entire article.
Remember that everyone is going to have different responses and that is
ok. Each topic sentence will be
different as well, but should all include the main points from the article.
These will be collected so do your best work!
Remember those periods at the end of sentences!”
7.
Assessment: I will collect the student’s individual responses to the 5
steps of summarization and look over them to be sure that each of the steps was
considered and contemplated. I will give
them questions about the article and have them right their answers down using
invented spelling. I walk around the room while students are recording
their responses to ensure that they are following the steps and thinking
thoroughly about their responses.
References:
“Bears and People: Learning to Live Together.”
Ives, Sarah. National
Geographic Magazine. 22 September
2004.
“Elephant Camp.” Thompson, Sharon.
National Geographic Kids Magazine.
4 May 2004.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/kids/2004/05/elephantcamp.html.
Pressley, M., Johnson, C.J., Symons, S., McGoldrick, J.A., & Kurity, J.A.
(1989). Strategies that improve
children’s memory and
comprehension of text. The
Elementary School Journal, 90,
3-32.