By: S. Davis Brooks
Reading to Learn
Rational: The goal of reading is being able to comprehend what has been read. Understanding the main idea is the goal of comprehension. This lesson will help teach children how to understand and comprehend a story through summarization.
Materials: A practice worksheet and a post-test worksheet.
Procedures:
1. Introduce the lesson by explaining
that when we read there are a lot of extra, unnecessary, junky words.
Our goal is to learn to not pay attention to the trivial words. Once
the unnecessary words are ignored, then it's easier to summarize.
Explain to the students what summarizing exactly is, by giving them a formal
definition. (summarization: presented in condensed form). After
presenting the formal definition, it will help to put it in more layman's
terms…Students, "this means, only mention the important words or the words
that stand out, the words that devote true meaning to the sentence(s)."
2. Next, write the following sentences
on the board: Richard, who has a pet named Chip, went to the store today
to buy milk and a loaf of bread. When he got to the checkout line,
he realized that he didn't have enough money to pay for his groceries.
3. (teacher only) Slowly, go
through the sentence and evaluate the words individually to see which words
or phrases really add meaning to the sentence. Tell the students,
" 'Richard went to the store and he didn't have enough money to pay for
his groceries;' is the main point of the sentence. Therefore, the
phrases that could have been left out were: 'who has a pet named
Chip,' and 'went to the store to buy milk and a loaf of bread.' "
Continue to explain that if those words were never put into the sentence,
we would still have been able to grasp the concept of the sentence.
4. (teacher and students) Repeat
#2 and #3 using a different sentence: Susan just got in from California
and is making five loaves of banana bread for the PTA meeting she has to
attend later tonight. This will now give the students an opportunity
to dissect the sentence and evaluate the word(s), but doing so with guidance
from the teacher.
5. When the teacher thinks that the
students are beginning to have an understanding of summarizing, then it
is time for individual practice. A worksheet with 12 different exercise
problems will be handled out to the students to complete. This will
work on silent reading.
6. The directions for the worksheet
are as follows: circle the important word(s) in the sentence and
put a line through the word(s) that are irrelevant. Then write one
or two sentence that tells the make idea(s) of the sentences.
7. When everyone is finished with
the worksheet, we will go over the correct answers as a class.
8. If there are any sentences that
multiple students summarized incorrectly, then the teacher will review
by writing the sentence on the board, and proceed just like in #2 and #3.
By doing this the students will be able to realize what they did wrong
and correct themselves.
9. For assessment, the students will
be handed out a post-test worksheet, containing five sentence exercises
on it (very similar to the worksheet that they just completed). After
the students finish the post-test, they are to turn it in to be check by
me for a grade.
10. From the grades, the teacher
will evaluate if the students have shown mastery and can move on, or if
the lesson need to be repeated; and possibly repeated in a different structure
and approach.
References:
Murray, Dr. Bruce. 2001. The
Reading Genie Website. Reading to learn: www.auburn.edu/rdggenie/breakthroughs/hoffmanrl.html
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