To Sum
It All Up…
Rationale: Our
goal when reading
is to comprehend, and one strategy to improve reading comprehension is
summarization. As students begin reading
expository texts, it is vital for them to be able to pick out and
summarize the
main themes and ideas of texts. This
lesson will equip students with summarization tools, and they will
practice
these using an expository article and graphic organizer.
Materials:
Pencils
Paper
Dry
erase board
Dry
erase markers
smartboard
and
markers (or projector)
Children’s articles: “Players
with Pride”
and “Just Call Him Toadzilla!” from Time
for Kids Magazine
Bookmark
checklist
for summarizing:
Pick
out important details that are
necessary to the story.
Pick
out less important or repeated ideas from the passage and cross through
them.
Highlight
the important and necessary details using key words.
Pick
out a topic sentence.
Create
a topic sentence if there isn’t one.
Procedures:
1. “Before we begin, we are going to review
reading silently because later we will be reading an article silently. Remember what we talked about while reading
silently. Watch me and tell me how well
I can read silently.” Over-dramatize the
eyes fixating on each word, and mouth the words as you read but do not
make any
sounds.
2. “Today we are going to learn about
summarization, which is a very helpful tool when you are reading. Can anyone tell me what summarization is?” See if students have some kind of background
knowledge that summarizing involves reading a text and picking out the
important parts or main ideas and deleting the information that isn’t
important.
3. “I am going to teach you five easy ways to
help you remember how to summarize.”
Pass out bookmarks to each student (these can be easily created
using
the checklist already mentioned).
Explain each process of summarizing.
“Let’s look at our bookmarks. The
first thing we do is pick out the important details that are necessary
to the
story or article. Then we are going to
decide what is not very important and delete it. Next
we will highlight the important details
by using the key words. We pick out a
topic sentence, and finally we create a topic sentence if there isn’t
one.”
4. “Now that you’ve learned how to summarize,
I’m going to show you one way to use that strategy.
Sometimes it’s easy to create a web when
summarizing. When you are reading, think
about what you think is important so you can come back to it once you
finish. When you create a web, you are
going to map out those important details from the story or article that
you
read.”
5. Pull up “Just Call Him Toadzilla!” onto the
Smartboard. “This article is an example of
a factual
article like the one you are going to read.”
Read the short article to the class for modeling purposes. “While I read, I’m going to make some mental
notes in my head about what I think might be important.
I now know from my reading that this article
is about cane toads so I am going to write ‘cane toads’ in the middle
of my web
(draw on dry erase board). When I
re-read, the first important fact I come to is ‘15-inch-long toad,’ so
I’m
going to draw a line out on my web and write that fact because it’s
important
to know how big the frogs are. I read a
little further, and I know that it’s not really very important what
Graeme
Sawyer says, so I am going to cross out that line.
Now who can tell me what the next important
fact is in the article?” After modeling
twice, scaffold the students so they can begin to try to find important
facts. Go down the checklist, writing
the important information and topic sentence on the web and deleting
the
unimportant information.
6. Now give each student a copy of “Players with
Pride,” a piece of white paper and have them get out a pencil. “In
Assessment: Have
the students turn in their webs and compare with the checklist from the
bookmark. The students will also use
their webs to write a summary of the text.
I will evaluate the summary to see if students identify the
steps listed
on the checklist.
Barton, Sarah.
“Summarizing Success!!!!” http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/reading_genie/constr/bartonrl.html
“Just Call Him Toadzilla!” Time for Kids Magazine.
Pickerill, Martha.
“Players with Pride.” Time
for Kids Magazine.
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index.