Rationale: Lesson will teach students to accurately use the summarization strategy in order to comprehend text.  Students will gain the summarization skill of retelling main ideas in the text into single sentence summaries of text.

Materials: The Great Golly Sister’s Go West (Harper Trophy, 1994), chart paper, markers

Procedure:
1. Introduce the lesson by explaining what it means to summarize passages that we read.  “Sometimes when we read a book and someone asks use what the book was about we summarize what we read.  That means that we only share the main ideas in the book, like the characters, setting, and what was the most important part of the story-what made the book good or bad to read”.
2. Put students in three groups and have each group a section of the book The Great Golly Sister’s Go West.  One group will be in charge of reading the beginning of the book, another group will read the middle of the book and the third group will read the end of the story.  “In your small groups your going to read your part of the book and then write down on the chart paper all the important information that you think the rest of the class would like to know about”.
3. When students have read their section of the book and written on the chart paper, have one student to be the representative of the group and share with the class what they had written down as the important information that we should all know about.
4. Once each group has shared to the class lead the class in a discussion about why they decided to write about what they did on the chart paper.  “Did each group write down the characters and where the story took place?  Did the other groups provide enough information so that you know what happened in the beginning, middle, and end of the story?”

Reference:  www.auburn.edu/rdggenie

Click here to return to Breakthroughs:

Click here for questions