Summing Up with
Polar Bears
Reading to Learn
Rationale:
The goal of reading is to comprehend the text. Summarization is a strategy
that allows students to take the important information from a passage and
remember it for further use, while disregarding unimportant or trivial
information. This way, the students can better comprehend the text. The
purpose of this lesson will be to teach students how to summarize by asking
themselves questions and learning the important steps of summarization.
Materials:
Handout of National Geographic Article “Polar Bears Listed as Threatened”
Summarization Handout
Pencils
White board
Dry erase markers
Procedure:
First, tell the students they will be reading an article about Polar Bears.
Refresh their minds by reminding them how to read silently. Be sure to
tell them that reading silently means that they do not talk with their neighbor
and show them how to follow along closely with the text and even how to reread
the passage if they are unclear about a portion of it.
Say, “Today we are going to learn how to summarize an article after we silently
read it to ourselves first. This will help you understand what you read in
the future and get the most out of your reading.”
Build Background Knowledge: “Let’s talk a little about Polar Bears. Where do
polar bears live? The arctic, good. What do polar bears eat? Seals.”
Make a chart of information students give about polar bears (building
background knowledge) “What does it mean to be an endangered animal? What
about an extinct animal? The article Polar Bears Listed as Threatened
is about why polar bears are endangered. However, the article does tell us how
we can prevent this as a nation. Let’s read on to find out what we can do.”
Have students read the article silently.
Wait until all children are finished reading. Say: Okay,
I think we’ve all finished are article now. Now we’re going to learn how
to summarize what we’ve just finished reading. Does anyone know what
summarization means? Great job! To summarize means that you have picked out the
important information from an article or story. There are several
important steps to remember when summarizing a story. Write
the steps on the board as you explain to the class.
Steps:
Delete unimportant information.
Delete repeated information.
Substitute easy terms for list of items
Write a series of events.
Select a topic.
Find the topic sentence, or make one if there is not one.
As you explain each step to the students, model the procedure and answer
questions they have. Say: These
are just a few steps that will make summarization a little easier for you.
If I read an article about how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I
don’t need to remember what brand of jelly used in the article or if they used
white or wheat bread. I need to remember the main points that it hit on. For
instance, I would need to remember to smooth peanut butter on one slice of
bread. After that, I would smooth jelly on a second slice of bread. Next
I need to put the two pieces of bread together, sticky sides touching. Those
would be the main points of the article.
Stop at this point and have the students mark out unimportant information in the
article. Talk about the deleted information aloud. “We do not need to remember
about the Secretary of the Interior, etc.” (See attached article with marked
through information)
Now have the students write each piece of important information that is left on
their Summarization Sheet.
Once students have done this, say “Now we can look at the important information
and decide what the article was about and how we can say it in one to two
sentences. This is called summarizing.” Have students write their own summaries
based on facts on Summarization Sheet.
Assessment:
I will read their Summarization Sheet to
check whether they understood the article that they just finished reading. They
should have included the main ideas or key points from the article.
References:
Polar Bear Article:
http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/kids/stories/animalsnature/polar-bears-threatened/
Summarization Lesson Plan by Casey Walker:
http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/reading_genie/adventures/walkerrl.htm