Rationale:
As students work on becoming skilled
readers, they must learn how to comprehend. A strategy to help in
improving comprehension is summarizing. Students must have
instruction
on how to successfully summarize a text so that they will be able to
read and understand what they are reading. They need to learn how
to
identify what is important and not important in a paragraph and then
how to delete the unimportant information as well as the repeated
information. Also, if students can shorten the amount of
information
given, they will better be able to remember what they have read once
they are finished. Students can add a series of events with an
action
term as well. Identifying the topic and creating a topic sentence
if
there is not already one can greatly aid in organizing thoughts as the
reader continues to read.
Materials:
-paper
-pencils
-Copies of "SuperCroc" from National
Geographic Kids (National Geographic Explorer (http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngexplorer/0203/articles/mainarticle.html)
for each student
-Bookmark for each student with the
summarizing checklist on it:
1. Delete unimportant information
2. Delete repeated information
3. Substitute easy words for lists 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 already
not one.
Procedure:
1. In order to begin the lesson, I
will start a discussion on
summarizing in order
to find out what students may already know about summarizing. To make sure that everyone understands, I
will say, "Summarizing is when we pick out the main
ideas from a paragraph so that we have a shorter amount of information
to understand and
remember." Today we are going to
work on becoming excellent summarizers so that when we read a
text, we will be
able to better comprehend it.
2.
To summarize as you
read on your own, you need to ask
yourself questions as you
read. As a class, we are going to
practice summarizing and to start out, I am going to ask questions out
loud that I might ask myself if I was reading silently.
The article that we are going to read today is about a crocodile
that is referred to as "SuperCroc".
Can anyone tell me a prediction or what you
think this article might be
about? (I will then allow the students to
give some answers and then close up the discussion.)
Just from the information I have given you
about the article, it could be
about a crocodile that can do a neat trick, that
saved someone, or maybe even just a really big crocodile.
Now we are going to read a part of the
article together and then go back and work on
our summarizing skills. I'm going to read
the story out loud and I want all of you to make sure that you are
paying attention and following along
as I read. Also, notice how I am
reading fluently and with expression like we
have talked about before so that I
will better understand what I am reading.
(Excerpt
from
article): "What
makes this croc so super? In a word,
size. The skull alone was six feet long! Sereno
says it's "about the biggest I've ever seen." Naturally, Sereno
wondered how big
SuperCroc was overall. There isn't a live SuperCroc around to
measure, and the team found only part of its skeleton. So Sereno had to
make an
estimate, or smart guess. To do that, he looked at crocodiles that live
today.
He and other experts compared the animals' skull and body sizes. Based
on his
research, Sereno concluded that an adult SuperCroc could grow to be 40
feet
long! That's roughly the length of a school bus."
Now, that we
have read part of the article, we need to pick out the important parts
that we
read in order to come up with a topic sentence and summary. I will then allow students to respond with
important
facts- super cause of it's
size, skull was 6 feet long, could be about 40 feet long, etc. Now we need to create a topic sentence from
what we read and from the main ideas that we picked out
together- SuperCroc
gets it's name because of it's size as it could be up to 40 feet long. Our topic sentence was created by adding
together all of the main ideas that we found from the text. Since
we have done some practicing together,
I want you to now read the rest of the article silently to yourself and
once
everyone is finished reading, we will work together on summarizing the
rest of
the article. Remember that if you don't
understand a sentence, you can use our cross-checking tool and go back
and
reread the sentence.
3. Now that you have read the entire article, I am going to give
you a bookmark
with the steps to summarizing on it in order to help you summarize what
you
have just read. (Hand out
bookmarks) As I read the steps aloud,
you read them silently.
Delete
unimportant information
Delete
repeated
information
Substitute
easy words for lists of items
Add a
series of events with an easy action term
Select
a topic
Invent
a topic sentence if there is already not one
It's important to delete
the unimportant information from an article or story because a lot of
the time
it can be distracting to us and make us forget the main point of what
we are
reading about. Getting rid of
the repeated
information, or information that we already now is helpful too because
it helps
us to determine the main topic of the text.
If we substitute easy words for a list of items, it makes it
less
information that we have to remember.
For example, if I said skittles, kit-kat, m&m's, and jolly
ranchers,
what is one word that describes all of those?
Yes, we could just think candy for all of those instead of
trying to
remember each individual one. We can
also add a series of events with an action term to help us remember the
passage
as well. Then we can select a topic for
our text and create a topic sentence that describes what we have read.
4. Let's talk about what we read in the article.
In order to do this, I'm going to show
you an easy way to help you understand summarizing and what you have
read. (Draw a web on the board) What I have
drawn on the board is called a
web. A web can help us to organize the
information that we read in an article or story so that we can more
easily
understand it. In this center circle, we
put what the entire article is about.
Who can tell me one word that describes what this article is
about? (SuperCroc) Great! So I will write
SuperCroc
in the center circle. Now, who can tell me
one thing that they read in the article that was
about SuperCroc? As students name facts, I
will write a few
of them on the web and explain to the students that as they recall
information
from a
passage, they can add them around the center of the web.
If we were to finish our web, we would have
a pretty simple summary of the article that we read.
For each part of the web, we could create one sentence and then
put all the sentences together to create a short paragraph that
summarizes the
much longer article.
5. Now I want you to find a partner and together, you are going
to use the article
and your bookmark and create a web on your own. I
want you to actually finish making your web and as you work on
it, I should see you doing things like, crossing out information in the
article
that wasn't important. Once you and
your partner have finished your web, I want you to write a short
paragraph
using your web that will be a summary for the article on SuperCroc.
6. For assessment, I will walk around and make sure that the
students understand
how to find the unimportant information in the article and cross it out. I will also check to see if they are putting
the most important ideas on the web and that they
are correctly creating their
web. I will then look at their
paragraphs that they write to see if they did pick out the main ideas
of the
article and made a good summary. Also,
I will be asking questions about the article in order to make sure that
the
students are comprehending what they are reading such as:
Why is this crocodile called SuperCroc? How
did they make a good guess on how big the
crocodile is?
References:
National Geographic Explorer-
http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngexplorer/0203/articles/mainarticle.html
Sensational Summarizers, by Valerie
Lunceford-
http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/reading_genie/guides/luncefordrl.html
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