Reading to Learn
Katie Lincoln
A Splendid Summarization
When
students are in the upper elementary grades, it is
crucial that they have comprehension skills.
Summarization is a great way to
assess students’ comprehension by having them recall the important
points from
a passage or story. However, until students are provided with
instruction on
how to summarize, many find it difficult to construct summaries on
their own.
This lesson will teach children through modeling how to summarize by
deleting
trivial and redundant information and focusing on the most important
information to create a summary.
Materials:
~
Copy of the article “Space Station Swap” from Time for Kids
magazine (
~
Copy of the summarization checklist for each student
~
Paper
~
Dry Erase Board and Marker
Procedures:
1.
Begin by discussing with the students that the purpose of
reading something to understand it.
Then, explain to them that there are several ways to go about
comprehending a story and one way to do so is summarization. Ask them, “Does anyone know what
summarization means?” Depending on their
responses, explain that summarizing is
retelling
something in our own words, but only including the main parts.
Tell the
students, “I am going to teach a few necessary steps that will help you
begin
to summarize your readings, and then we will practice summarizing some
text
together.”
2. There are three easy steps to
summarization. Write these steps on the board and explain them. Also, pass out these three steps in a
checklist format so that the students can use it to follow when they
are
summarizing (see attached).
Step 1:
Keep the
most important details.
Step 2:
Get rid
of the less important details.
Step 3:
Write it
in your own words.
3. Next, pass out the article from
Time for Kids magazine titled “Space
Station Swap” to each student. Tell
them, “You may begin reading the article but, only read the first
paragraph and
when you are finished please look up at me.”
4. Now, model for the students how
to model the first paragraph. Read the
paragraph out loud to the students and ask them to listen for the
important
information. Aloud, summarize the first
paragraph for the students on the board, following the 3 steps above. (Ex. After a 3 ½ hour voyage, three
astronauts in a space capsule landed safely back on Earth.) After modeling how to summarize the first
paragraph, encourage the students to continue reading and to stop after
every
paragraph and write down the important information.
Also, remind them to use their own words when
they are summarizing and remind them to use the three easy steps to
summarization to help them.
5. Let the students continue to
read the rest of the article silently and work on their summarizations.
6. While the students are reading
and working on their summaries, walk around and make sure that they are
not
having any problems and that they are only including the important
details in
their summaries.
7. Assessment: Take up the
students summaries and check that they only kept the important details,
got rid
of the less important ones, and used their own words in their summaries.
References:
1.
Brock, Allison. Super Summarizers. http://www.auburn.edu/rdggenie/constr/brockrl.html
2. “Space
Station Swap” Time
for Kids magazine.
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