Whitni DeNamur

Reading to Learn

Title: “Summarizing the Good Stuff”

Rationale: Comprehension is one of the most important things for children to learn when they are reading to learn. Summarizing text with children is an effective strategy to teach comprehension. This lesson will teach children how to summarize the information they read in order to find the important information from a text. Summarizing helps children understand what they have read and remember important details.

 

Materials:

Scholastic News Article from November 15, 2004 “The Next Four Years”, one for each child. www.scholastic.com

A poster with the guide lines listed below to summarize an article.

Guidelines: Delete unimportant information
       Delete repeated information
       Substitute easy terms for lists of items

 Add a series of events with an easy action term
 Select a topic
 invent a topic sentence if there is none.

Paper and pencils for each group

 

 

Procedures:

  1. Begin the lesson by handing out a copy of “The Next Four Years” 11/15/04, A Scholastic News Article. “I want each of you to read this article silently in a few minutes. While reading, remember to follow along with the passage and re-read when necessary. Go ahead and begin reading the article now.”
  2. “Once everyone has finished, please look up at me so I will know you are done.
  3. “Now, boys and girls, we are going to practice summarizing what we have read so we can learn the important facts of the article.
  4. Summarizing means that we are going to pick out the main parts of the article we just read. When summarizing this article, we need to remember to do these important things:
  5. Show Children poster with these important ideas to remember when summarizing on it:

 Delete unimportant information
       Delete repeated information
       Substitute easy terms for lists of items

 Add a series of events with an easy action term
 Select a topic
 invent a topic sentence if there is none.

 

  1. By using these guidelines, it will make it easier for us to summarize this article.
  2. “We are now going to apply these steps to the article we just read. We are going to break up into groups of two and summarize the article. Model for the children how to find the main idea. Read through article out loud and find main idea together.
  3. We are going to write a summary with our partners using these questions along with several other questions such as “what is the main idea, who are the main characters, and what is the setting.”
  4. After each group finishes, I will read all of the summaries to see that you answered all of the questions.
  5. To wrap up, have one volunteer read their summary out loud to class and discuss.

References:

“Strategies that Improve Children’s Memory and Comprehension of Text.”  Pressley, et al.  The Elementary School Journal.  Volume 90, Number 1.  1989

Get the Skinny!  Summarize a Story! By: Kristin Herren. http://www.auburn.edu/rdggenie/guides/herrenrl.html

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