What Was
THAT All
About?
Reading
to Learn Lesson Design
Rationale:
As children
approach the late elementary school years, comprehension becomes a very
important skill for them to acquire.
Children are expected to remember information that they read,
especially
from an expository text. In order for
children to be able to recall the main points of something they have
read, they
must be able to summarize the information.
However, until students are provided instruction on how to
construct
summaries, this is very difficult for them.
By teaching children how to delete trivial and redundant
information,
superordinate items and events, and either find or create a topic
sentence that
covers the main idea of the story, we can help children to better
remember
information that they read.
Materials:
-
Copies of
National Geographic Online’s Snake Safari
for each student.This can be
found at:
http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngexplorer/0409/articles/mainarticle.html -
Paper for each
student
-
Pencils
-
Chalkboard
-
Chalk
Procedure:
- Begin
by saying “Today we are going to be doing some silent reading. Before we start, we need to review how we read
silently. I have an article right here
that I need to read to myself. I am going
to read it silently.” Model how to read
silently for the children. Over-dramatize
your eyes moving from word to word. Your
mouth can even make motions of reading the words without making any
sound. After you have read for a couple of
minutes, ask the students, “Who remembers some important rules for
reading silently? Let’s list these rules
on the board.” (Let the children suggest rules like: We should not be
talking to anyone around us, we should look at every word and say it to
ourselves as we read, we should not say words out loud so that we won’t
disturb our neighbor, etc.) “Good! These are all great things to remember when we
are having silent reading time.”
- Introduce
the lesson by explaining what it means to summarize
what we read. Say, “Today we are going to
talk about how important it is to understand what we read.
If we read something and we don’t understand it, then we
won’t be able to apply it to our own lives. A
good way for us to understand something that we read is to summarize
the text after we read it. To summarize a story means to pick out the main idea of a
story, so that we can remember and understand the information easier. Sometimes stories have a lot of information in
them, and only some of that information—the most important details—help
us to understand the story. Today we are
going to learn some rules to help us summarize a story.”
- Explain
to the children, “There are 3 steps that help us to summarize
information when we read. I have written
these steps on the board.”
1)
Delete
information that is not important or is repeated.
2)
If
there are
lists of items or events, think of one main heading or word for this
information, instead of listing each item or event.
3)
Find
a topic
sentence that covers the main idea of the story, and if there is not a
topic sentence,
create one.
- Hand
out copies of Snake Safari to the children. Say, “A great way to help us organize this
information when we are reading a story is to make a map. Today, we are
going to read the article Snake Safari to ourselves,
and then we are going to work as a class to create a map to explain the
main ideas of this article. I want each of
you to read this article to yourself silently. When
you are finished, you can begin discussing with your neighbor what the
article was about.”
- Once
everyone seems to have finished reading, say to the children, “Now
let’s make a map to help us summarize this article.
When we make a summary map, we put the main topic, which is
usually found in the title of the story, in a circle in the middle of
our paper. Who can tell me what the topic
of our article is? That’s right, snakes! So we are going to write the word snakes
in our topic circle. (Write this on the
board.)
- Now
that we know our topic, we will draw antennas from our circle to
describe different important facts that the article told us about
snakes. 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. So,
if I was thinking of a detail to include, I might write something like Cobras are the longest snakes. They
are venomous. (Write this on the board
as a line coming out from the main idea circle.) The beginning of the
article spends several paragraphs discussing cobras, so this is
obviously an important fact from the article. Can
anyone think of an example of something that would not be important
information to include in our summary map? You’re
right! It is not important that the author
did not want the snake to bite him. So we
would not include that as an antenna on our map.”
- Tell
the children, “I want you to try to finish this summary map on your own. Think of the important details of the story,
and try to think of one or two words that can replace lists of words or
events. Once you have completed your map,
think of a topic sentence that will cover the main idea of the
information in the map. When you have your
map and topic sentence complete, it should be easy for you to write a
summary of this article. You should be
able to use the topic sentence and the detail sentences that you have
listed to write a short summary that would tell someone who had not
read this article what it is about.”
- Tell
the children that when they are finished with their summaries, they
need to take out a book for silent reading time. Explain
to them that you will be calling them up in groups to talk about their
summaries. For assessment, call different
groups of children up to have a conference about their summaries. Have them each read what they have written,
and use the following rubric to analyze how well the summary has been
written: