Learning About Lemurs – A
Summarization
By:
Lauren Beno
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, et. al.) 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, using five
summarization
steps listed below to aid them in summarizing an Article about Lemurs.
After
this lesson, my goal for them will be that hopefully, 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
3.
Highlight the important and necessary details using key words.
4.
Pick a topic sentence
5.
Invent a topic sentence if there is none.
-Copy of the article Lemurs, in National
Geographic
Kids News for each student("Lemurs" appears on pages 18-23 of
the October 2005 issue).
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 it invent a topic sentence if we don’t have one.
I’m
going to pass out bookmarks to each of you that have these steps on
them so you
won’t forget our 5 steps of summarization. You can use these
whenever you
need a little help."
3. "Alright, now that we are familiar with
comprehension
and summarization, we are going to read a passage from an article and
put our
steps into action. Read the section that is noted “Night
Stalkers”
SILENTLY 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 is finished reading, summarize
this first
section with the whole class making sure they understand the steps of
summarization. While doing this as a class, make sure to model
the five
steps. "After reading the first paragraph, here are the main
points that I came up with." Write the following on the
board: 1. The Aye-Aye is the strangest lemur of all.
2. This lemur is nocturnal, this means it comes out at
night. "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:
1. Some Lemurs have an image problem. 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 student to suggest: highlight some keywords. "Great
job! You’re right. I thought that the keywords were:
Nocturnal,
Insects, Hollow trees, Long Claw . 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: There are about 60
different kinds of Lemurs, some are nocturnal, some only come out in
the
daytime – the aye-aye is
nocturnal. 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 yall another section to summarize in the
Lemur
article. Give the students another section and place them in
groups of no
more than four. This allows them to collaborate about their different
ideas
without me telling them how to do it. During this time I will walk
around
monitoring their progress.
6. Allow them to finish their group discussions, and
then ask
each group to share one step they discovered in their section. Now
students,
I want each of yall to read the rest of the article silently. Give a brief article talk – “Students, you
have been introduced somewhat to the lives and nature of Lemurs. I want
you to
continue to learn about them by reading the rest of this article. You
will
learn where they live, and how people are helping this interesting
creature
escape form the risk of being endangered.”
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.
References:
·
Fleming, Nell. 1,2,3…A
summary! http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/reading_genie/connect/flemingrl.html
·
Ebersole, Rene. Lemurs.
http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngexplorer/0510/articles/mainarticle.html
·
Melton, Shealy. Summin
It All Up. http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/reading_genie/connect/meltonrl.html