Sum
It Up!
Rationale: Through this lesson, children
will be learning to summarize the
text they are reading. Once students can learn to summarize the text,
they will
ultimately understand the text, and find meaning out of what they read.
Materials:
A class copy of Miss Nelson is Missing By: Harry Allard and James
Marshall (Houghton Miifflin C0. 1985)
Highlighters
for each child
Dry
Erase Board and Marker
Checklist (included)
Procedure:
1.
Begin the lesson
with a review of silent reading. "Can anyone tell
me what silent reading is? Good, it is when we keep our mouths silent
and read
to ourselves in our minds. Does anyone remember why it is a good idea
to read
silently? Right, it helps us remember what we read.
2. Now we are
going to
learn a
new idea that helps us understand our text even more. Does anyone know
what is
means to summarize a story? Well, it means to give a shorter version of
a
story, or event, telling only the most important parts. Today we are
going to
learn how to summarize what we read using just a few steps. Once I
explain it
to you, you can practice summarizing stories on your own."
3.
I will teach the
students the five basic steps used in
summarization and write these on the board as I explain. "There are
five steps
that you can use to help you summarize a story:
Step 1: Pick out important details
that are necessary to the story.
Step 2: Pick out the less important or repeated ideas from the story
and
eliminate them.
Step
3: Highlight the important details using keywords.
Step 4: List keywords in the
order that they appeared in the passage.
Step 5: Cut down the list of key
words into just one topic sentence. Now, we are going to practice using
these
steps as we summarize our stories."
4.
"Now I am going to pass out a new
story, Miss Nelson is Missing. I want everyone to practice reading the
first
three pages silently to yourself. We will finish the rest of the story
later."Give everyone enough time to read through the first three pages.
5.
"Ok, now I am going to show you
how
I can use these five steps (pointing to board) to summarize what I read
so that
I can understand it. As I read the first page, I want you to be
thinking about
the important facts that I read." I will give a summary of the first
page. "Did
you see how I used the five steps to create my summary? I used the most
important information in my summary and left out the things that were
repeated
and less important. Now I will pull out some keywords from the story in
order.
Then I will cut down the list to make one topic sentence. Let’s read
the
sentence together."
6.
Pass out the highlighters to each
child. "Now I want you to summarize the rest of pages 1-3. Remember to
use the
five steps that are listed on the board. Begin by using your
highlighter on
important parts in the story." Walk around the room give advice on the
children’s summaries.
6.
For the assessment, have the
children read the rest of the story and provide a summary for the rest
of it. Make
a checklist that lists all the necessary parts of the summary and make
sure
each child includes that in their summary. Make sure that redundant and
trivial
information was left out of the summary and that only main points and
ideas
were included.
Checklist:
Redundant information was taken out:
O Yes O No
Trivial information was taken out:
O
Yes O No
There are only main points in the
summarization:
O Yes
O No
References:
Emily
Watts - "Super Summarizer!"
-Pressley,
M., C.J. Johnson, S. Symons, J.A. McGoldrick, and J.A. Kurity (1989) Strategies
that Improve Children's Memory and Comprehension of Text. The
Elementary
School Journal, 90, 3-32.
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