Superstar Summarizing 

Reading to Learn

By: Tara Killen

Rational: After children are able to read with fluency and speed, they must begin to move on to the next step in reading. This is the reading to learn step. Children must be able to read and summarize all kinds of reading materials so that they are able to learn. This lesson will begin to teach students how to find the important information in a passage. They will read a passage and then discuss as a class what the important information is. They will highlight this material and then write a summarization from the information that they have highlighted.

Materials:

• Copies of "The Celebration" from National Geographic Kids for each student (http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/Stories/History/First-thanksgiving)
• Highlighter for each student
• Paper
• Pencils
• White board
• Summarizing poster (pre-made by the teacher with the steps on it- Number One, pick out the important details.  Number Two, pick out the details that are repeated or are not important and get rid of them.  Number Three, use easy keywords to highlight important details.  Number Four, list those keywords in order as they appeared in the passage.  Number Five, trim the list of keywords to make one topic sentence.)

Procedure:

• "Today we are going to do some more silent reading. I am going to pass out a passage about the first Thanksgiving. ("book talk") People have lots of different ideas about the first Thanksgiving. This passage is going to help us to understand what really happened a little bit better. I want you to each read the passage to yourself and then we are going to talk about it." (Have students read then begin to talk about summarizing the passage.)
• "We are going to summarize what you have just read. Can anyone tell me what summarize means? Right, it means to pick out the important information. I am going to teach you five special steps that will help you summarize. Let's look at this poster!" (have students look at summarization poster)
• "Okay, the first step is to decide what we think is important. I am going to show you what I mean. Read along with me." (Read the first few sentences.) "Okay, now something that I thought was important was that the Native Americans were the Wampanoag people. Someone tell me what you thought was important!" (Have the students raise their hands and offer that they thought was important. Write the facts on the board.)
• "Now that we have all of these wonderful facts, let's pick out what really isn't very important. Step 2 is that we should get rid of any repeated material. Let's look for what is repeated." (Mark out unimportant material.)
• "Okay, now I want you to highlight the material that we have decided to keep. That is step 3. Now we need to write the words down on our paper in order, which is step 4. Great! Let's make a sentence that that summarizes this passage using the information and words that we have kept." (The students will write their own sentences then they will share them with the class.)

Assessment: The teacher will collect the summaries and look to see that they used all of the important information the write a sentence.

References: Stevens, Elizabeth. Super Summarization. http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/reading_genie/odysseys/stevensrl.html

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