Get the Facts!
November 14, 2006
Rationale: It is essential for students to comprehend their reading. Summarization is a technique that students can use to figure out the main idea of a reading. Students work on their comprehension skills through summarization. Students will learn to summarize a passage using five simple rules to summarization, modeling by the teacher, and using a passage to summarize on their own.
Materials: paper and pencils for each student, a copy of the summarization steps on a bookmark for each student made on cardstock, overhead projector,
an overhead transparency of ãCool Things About Elephantsä by Aline Alexander Newman http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ngkids/0606/index.htm.
Summarization steps:
1. Pick out important details that are necessary to
the story and highlight the key words.
2. Eliminate the parts of the passage that are not
important to the main idea or information that is repeated. .
3. Pick a topic sentence out of the passage. Or,
write a topic sentence if there is not one.
Procedures:
1. First, I will ask the students if they remember what we talked in our last lesson. I will wait and see their responses. ãRemember how important it is to read silently? You have learned to read silently, so you can now read anywhere, even in places that you have to be quiet. Today, we are going to focus on summarizing what you read.ä
2. Then, I will explain summarization. ãSummarization is a way that you can comprehend what you are reading. It is a way to pick out what is important from what you read. Comprehension is another word for understanding. When you summarize a passage, you pick out the important information from the reading and write a paragraph using the important information. There are three easy steps to summarizing.ä I will then pass out the bookmarks to each student. ãNow, look at your bookmark. The three steps to summarizing are:
1. Pick out important
details that are necessary to the story and highlight the key words.
2. Eliminate the parts of the passage that are not
important to the main idea or information that is repeated. .
3. Pick a topic sentence out of the passage. Or,
write a topic sentence if there is not one.
3. I will pass out a copy of ãCool Things About Elephantsä by Aline Alexander Newman to each student. Then, I will give a booktalk on the article. ãDid you know that elephants can talk to each other? Did you think that elephants ever forget anything? Read ãCool Things About Elephantsä to find out if this is true and how this can happen!ä
4. I will put the article up on the overhead projector so that all of the students can see the article. I will read the first section of the article aloud. Then, I will highlight the important, key facts in the paragraph. Then, I will cross through the parts of the article that are not essential or are repeated. Finally, I will highlight the topic sentence. Then, I will use this information to write a summary. I will put in only the important facts as well as the topic sentence to the article.
5. Now, ãEveryone read through the second section of this article SILENTLY.ä Then, when everyone is finished reading, we will begin to summarize as a group. I will put the copy of the first section of the article up on the overhead projector.
6. ãEveryone get out your bookmarks to help you remember the five steps to summarization. First, we are going to pick out the important details in the story.ä I will underline the important parts in the article, including ãElephants never forget. ÎThey keep coming to places they like, no matter whatâ. And, ãtradition continues for another elephant generationä. Then, I will highlight the key words and ideas in the important facts that we picked out on the overhead.
7. ãNext, we will cross out all of the information that is repeated or not important.ä I will ask the students to pick out information that is not important, and I will cross this out on the overhead.
8. ãNow, we must pick out a topic sentence for this part of the article. A topic sentence is the main idea of a section of reading. I think there is one already written in the article. What do you think it is? Right, ÎElephants never forget. They keep coming to places they like, no matter what.â But, this is two sentences. How can we combine this into one topic sentence? My topic sentence would be ÎElephants keep coming to places they like and donât ever forgetâ.ä
9. Now, you read the rest of the article and summarize the rest of the article. Be sure to come up with a topic sentence for each section of the reading.
Assessment: I will take up the studentsâ summarizations of the article. I will check and make sure that the students summarized the article correctly and that they were able to weed out the important information. I will use the following checklist to assess the summaries.
Checklist:
___ The student has a topic sentence.
___ There is no irrelevant, repeated information.
___ The student has included all important information in the summary.
References:
Newman, Aline Alexander. ãCool Things About Elephantsä. http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ngkids/0606/index.htm.
Gamble, Beth. ãSuper Space Summarization.ä http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/reading_genie/invent/gamblerl.html.
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