Learning to Read Design
Let’s be Star Summarizers!
Learning to Read Design
Rationale:
Summarization
is an
important skill that helps students learn to read for meaning and
understanding. If students can summarize
text, they are able to understand what they read. If
a student is able to summarize skillfully,
he is able to delete trivial information, and focus on finding the main
idea of
the article or story and important supporting details.
This lesson teaches students how to summarize
so that they can understand the main idea of what they read.
Materials:
One
piece of
notebook paper for each student
One
pencil per
student
Chalk
and
chalkboard
A copy
of National
Geographic Article “U.S. Endangered Species Act Works” by Maryann Mott
for each
student
A copy
of National
Geographic Article “Toad Tunnels” by John Roach for each student
Procedure
1.
Today, we are
going to learn how to summarize what we have read.
Summarizing is important for helping us
understand what we read. Does anyone
know what the word summarize
means? Let the students give their ideas
of what a summary is. To summarize means
to find the main idea of the passage or story that you read. When you write a summary, you want to pick
out the most important facts. Here are
six steps that will help you when summarizing.
Write these steps on the board:
1. Delete unimportant information.
2. Delete repeated information.
3. Substitute easy terms for list of items.
4. Add a series of events with an easy action
term.
5.
Select a topic.
6. Invent a topic sentence if there is none.
2. Pass out a copy of the article “U.S.
Endangered Species Act Works” to each student.
This article is very important because it discusses whether a
law called
the U.S. Endangered Species Act is helping to save animals that are in
danger. Some people think that the law
is not working. Let’s read to see if the
law is helping to save animals. We are
going to read, and then summarize the article together.
I want you to read to yourself and look for
the main point of the article while I read out loud.
Now, I am going to pick out the main point of
the article: If an endangered
animal is protected by the
3. Now that I have shown you how to write a
summary, I am going to let you practice summarizing by yourself. Give each student a copy of the article “Toad
Tunnels” and a sheet of notebook paper. First,
I want you to read the article silently to yourself.
Then, I want you to answer the questions that
I have written on the board: What is the
title of the article? What is the main
idea of this article? Write three
sentences to support the main idea. Using
these questions, write one paragraph to summarize the article.
4. After everyone gets finished summarizing the
article individually, we are going to summarize it as a class. What is the main idea of “Toad Tunnels?” Let a couple of students raise their hand and
give their thoughts on what the main idea is.
Write a topic sentence on the board based on what the students
say. What are some supporting details that
back up
the main point? Let several students
answer. Pick out the most important facts that the students give you,
and write
them on the board. Does the summary
on
the board look like the summary that you wrote on your paper? Did you pick out the same important details
as your classmates?
5. Assessment:
Have students turn in summaries that they wrote.
Look to see if each student wrote a topic
sentence, and was able to pick out some important supporting details
and write
them in their own words.
References:
Maryann
Mott. “
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/04/0418_050418_endangered.html
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/04/0415_050415_toadtunnels.html
http://www.auburn.edu/rdggenie/guides/wheelerrl.html
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