Let’s
Really Sum it Up!
Rationale: One
great way to show that you really understand what you have read is to
sum up
the main ideas in your own words. This
lesson will focus on helping children learn how to summarize. They will learn how to pick out the important
information of what they are reading.
Materials:
Pencil
Paper
Big chart of a
summarization checklist
Procedures:
1.
We are going to learn a new strategy to help us understand what we are
reading. This is called
summarizing. Summarizing is when you
locate all of the important parts of a story and leave out the details
that are
not really important.
2.
Give all the students a copy of the story Stellaluna. Introduce the story to them: This is a story about a
baby bat who gets seperated from its mother one night. The baby
bat tries to become part of a bird family, but it is just too different
from the birds, it is sad and lonely. Read the story to find out
what happens to the bat. Ask all of them to read the
story silently.
3.
When they have finished have them look up at the board.
Now we are going to try to summarize this
story together. Show them the chart with
the summarization steps on it: 1. Delete unimportant information
2. Delete repeated
information
3. Substitute
easy terms for lists of terms
4. Add a
series of events with an easy action term
5. Select a topic
6. Invent a
topic sentence if there is not one
4. What are a few
words that might tell us
what the whole story is about? (Write their thought on the board as a
web with
the main words as the center of the web) Tell me some of the things
that happened
in the story to the bat (these thoughts are smaller circles coming off
the
center)
5.
Have the students copy the web onto their own paper and add some more
thoughts
in small groups as you walk around and see what they come up with. Then
have
them share their ideas with the class and finish the big web on the
board.
6.
Have the students help you write a paragraph using the web. Show them
how to
write a topic sentence using the words they came up with in the middle
of the
web. Have them come up with sentences
for you to write on the board to summarize the story.
Evaluation
Choose
a book for them to summarize in centers or at home for homework.
Evaluate the
paragraphs by checking to see if they included all of the imporant
information from the story, did they delete important parts, did they
include unneccisary information, did they understand the main idea of
their story?
Reference:
http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/reading_genie/explor/bellrl.html
Click
here to return to Perspectives