Don’t Despise,
Summarize!
Ready
to Learn
Amy Berger
Rationale
The goal of reading instruction is comprehension. In order to comprehend text, it is necessary for students to learn strategies that they can use on their own. Summarization is an effective, research-based strategy that aids children in comprehending text (Pressley) Three rules make up the strategy of summarization: deleting trivia and redundancies, superordinating items and events, and compositing a statement to cover everything the writer is saying. In this lesson, students will work in pairs and use the five summarization steps listed below to aid them in summarizing an Article about “The Truth Behind Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest.” After this lesson, they will be able to effectively comprehend text by using the summarization strategy on their own.
Materials
-Paper
-Pencil
-A bookmark for each student with the 5 summarization steps on it
Summarization
steps:
1.
Pick out important details that are necessary to the story.
2.
Pick out the less important or repeated ideas from the passage
and
eliminate them.
3.
Highlight the important and necessary details using key words.
4.
Pick a topic sentence
5.
Invent a topic sentence if there is none.
-Copies of
“The Truth Behind Pirates of the
By Deborah Underwood
National Geographic Kids Magazine
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/kids/2006/09/piratestwo.html
- Copies of “"Godzilla" Fossils Reveals Real-Life Sea Monster” for each student
By Stefan Lovgren
National Geographic Kids News
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/kids/2005/11/godzilla.html
Procedure
1. Begin by asking students if anyone knows what
comprehension means. Wait for response and then review their
responses.
"Good job! Comprehension is understanding what we are reading and
then remembering it after we are done. Today we are going to
learn a
couple of steps that are going to help us comprehend our reading.
This
new technique is called summarization. When we summarize, we
choose the
most important parts of the story or passage that we are reading.
The
whole time we are doing this, we take out some of the stuff that really
doesn’t
have anything to do with the main idea."
2. Explain summarization. "Our new tool has 5
easy
steps to remember." Write them on the board as they are explained
so
students will follow along. "The first step is to pick out
important
details that we think are necessary to the story. Number two says
to pick
out the less important ideas or ideas that are repeated and take them
away. Number three says to highlight the important and necessary
details
using key words. Next, we pick a topic sentence. Our last
step is to
invent a topic sentence if we don’t have one.” Then pass out the
bookmarks to each of the students to aid in remembering the 5 steps of
summarization.
3. "Alright, now that we are familiar with
comprehension
and summarization, we are going to read an article and put our steps
into
action.” Have the students read the
article “Godzilla Fossils Reveals Real-Life Sea Monster.” Now I want
you to SILENTLY
read the article to yourselves. While you are reading, make sure
that you
are getting enough information to summarize the paragraph. When
summarizing, remember how key it is to make sure that you are trying to
figure
out the important details from the ones that might not be so
important.
Raise your hand when you are done so we’ll know when to move on."
4. After the class has finished reading, summarize
the
paragraphs of the articles with the whole class making sure they
understand the
steps of summarization. Go through the article with the students
and talk about the important aspects. Highlight parts of key
sentences and cross off the words or sentences that are not relevant to
summarization of the article. While doing this as a class, make
sure to model
the five steps. "After reading the first four paragraphs,
here
are the main points that I came up with." Write the following
on
the board: 135-million-year-old "sea monster", new kind of ancient
crocodile, "Godzilla" lived entirely in the water, fish-like, short,
high snout and teeth that were large and jagged, Godzilla hunted for
marine
reptiles and other large sea creatures, meat-eating dinosaur. "Did
anybody
get anything different than I did?" If someone did, write that on
the board as well. "As I keep
reading, I’m going to use all of our steps. I just did our first
step and
picked out what I thought were the important details. My next
step is to
pick out the less important points from the paragraph. I think
these
would be: instead of legs… used mostly to keep it stable. Write this on the board. "Did
anyone get something different?" If they did, write it on the
board. "What is my next step?" Wait for students to
suggest: highlight some keywords. "Great job! You’re
right. I thought that the keywords were: crocodyliforms,
marine
crocodilian, marine reptiles, meat-eating dinosaur.
Did anybody get another word?" If
they did, write it on the board. "What do I need to do
now?" Wait for student response. "Right! I need to
write a topic sentence. The topic sentence I came up with
is:"
Write this sentence on the board: Scientists have discovered a new kind
of
ancient crocodile that has completely different eating habits and
features that
today’s crocodile. Did somebody get
something else?" If they did, write it on the board and discuss
why
they chose that. "Good! Since we just came up with our
topic
sentence, we don’t need to do step 5 since that step is to invent a
topic
sentence." Make sure that this information is written on the
board
so they will be able to look at it when they are reading the rest of
the
article silently to themselves.
5. “Now that you all got to see how to summarize, I
will
place you in groups and give you all another article to summarize.”
Give the
students the “The Truth Behind Pirates of the
6. Allow them to finish their group discussions, and
then ask
each group to share one step they discovered in their section. “I want
each of you
to read the rest of the article silently.”
7.
For assessment, the students will write
a brief coherent paragraph summarizing the article. I want them to use
the
steps that we went over but not just list them, I want their ideas to
flow and
make sense. I will use the bookmarks as my own checklist to make
sure
that they used all of the steps of summarization correctly. I
will also ask the following questions:
- What did the pirates display in the movie that is not true to
pirates in real life?
- Using evidence from the article, do you think the movie was
accurate to real pirate life? Explain why or why not.
References:
· Fleming, Nell. 1,2,3…A summary! http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/reading_genie/connect/flemingrl.html
· Melton, Shealy. Summin It All Up. http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/reading_genie/connect/meltonrl.html
· Beno, Lauren. Learning About Lemurs – A Summarization. http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/reading_genie/persp/benorl.html