All
in a Nutshell
Reading
to Learn Lesson Design
Rationale:
As
students enter
the latter elementary grades, it is crucial that they have strong
comprehension
skills. 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:
Procedure:
1.
Begin
by telling the students
that we are going to be doing some silent reading today. However,
before we
start let’s discuss some of the things we do or do not do while we are
reading
silently. Have students share some responses such as we do not talk or
say any
words as we are reading, we keep our eyes focused on only our story,
and we do
not disturb our neighbor.
2.
Next,
I will model for the
students how we read silently. I will over-dramatize my eye movement
from right
to left and may also move my mouth to the sound of each word so
students can
see how silent reading should take place.
3.
Next,
I will introduce the
lesson by explaining to students that an important step in
comprehension is to
be able to summarize a story. This ensures that you are grasping the
main
points of a passage. Explain that a good way to understand something is
to
summarize. When we summarize a story, we pick out the main ideas and
facts so
we can remember the important aspects of the story. Sometimes there is
a lot of
information in a story but only the most important details are needed
to help
us understand the story. Today we are going to learn some rules that
will help
us summarize a story.
4.
Explain
summarization by writing the five steps on the board. I will go through
each
step so students will understand them. The
first step is to pick out important details that we think are necessary
to the
story. Number two says to pick out the less important ideas or
ideas that
are repeated and take them away. Number three says to highlight
the
important and necessary details using key words. Next, we pick a
topic
sentence. Our last step is to invent a topic sentence if we don’t
have
one. I’m going to pass out bookmarks to each of you that have
these steps
on them so you won’t forget our 5 steps of summarization. You can
use
these whenever you need a little help.
5.
Hand
out copies of Mighty Oaks Recover After
Hurricane Katrina to each student. Explain to the students that a
great way
to help us remember important things from the article is to make a
story map.
Today, we are going to silently read the article to ourselves, and then
together we will create our story map. When I say begin, I want you to
begin
reading. As you read, try to remember what the article is about. When
you and
the student sitting next to you has finished, you may discuss the
article and tell
each other what you think it is about. “You may begin reading now.”
6.
Monitor
students reading by
walking around the room and when everyone has finished, have everyone
look up
the board. Explain to students that we are going to construct a story
map. When
we do this, we draw a big circle in the middle of our page and we write
the
topic of the story inside the circle. Who can tell me what the topic of
the
story is? Good Job! It is Mighty Oak Trees. Therefore, we place Mighty
Oak
Trees in the center of our circle. Model this for the students on the
board.
7.
Now
that we have identified
our topic, we draw lines coming out from our circle and draw new
circles at the
end of each of these. Model this for the students on the board. We them
brainstorm different important facts about our Mighty Trees to place
inside
these circles. Remember, though, that when we are thinking of these
details,
our rules tell us that we don’t need to include information that is not
important. If
I was trying to think of a detail I might want to include in a circle,
I may
put, “The Live Oak Society honors the oldest and biggest live oaks” or
“The
flooding might danger the oak trees.” Can anyone think of something
that would
not be important enough to include in one of our circles? That’s right!
Something we would not include is who the chairmen of the society are
because
that does not tell me anything about the oak trees.
8.
At
this point, tell the children you are going to give them a chance to
finish our
summary map on their own. Explain to them that they need to remember to
focus
on the important details of the story and also to think of a few words
that can
replace a longer sentence or a list of words and events. “Once all of
you have
completed your map, I want you to brainstorm a topic sentence for your
summary.
I want all of you to use this sentence you create plus your summary map
to
write a paragraph summarizing the article we just read.
9.
To
assess the children, I will call them up individually to my desk and
have them
read their summaries to me. I will ask them questions involving the
five steps
of summarizing to see if they used any of the rules in their summaries.
References:
Fox,
Catherine Clarke. Mighty
Oaks Recover After Hurricane Katrina. National Geographic Kids News
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/kids/2005/11/trees.html
Pressley,
M., Johnson, C. J., Symons, S.,
McGoldrick, J. A., and Kurita, J.A. (1989).
Strategies
that Improve Children’s Memory and Comprehension of Text. The
Elementary School Journal. 90(1), 3-32.
Walton,
Rebecca. Let’s Be
Star Summarizers.
http://www.auburn.edu/rdggenie/connect/waltonrl.html
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