“What’s It All About?”

Reading to Learn

 Sarah Sullivan
sulliss@auburn.edu

 

Rationale: Comprehension is very important when reading. It is very important for children for children to learn comprehension strategies early in their learning to read. One great way for students to develop comprehension is through summarization. Summarization is important because children need to be able to know what is important in the text that they are reading. Summarization allows the children to think about and understand the important things that they read leading to comprehension.

 

Materials:

            -Paper

            -Pencil

            -White board

            -Dry erase markers

            - 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 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.

            - Copy of Space Rock Makes a Crash Landing, National Geographic Kids News    
         for each student.

 

Plan:

 

  1. First we will begin by reviewing what comprehension is. Ask the students what they think comprehension is. Good job! When we are reading it is important that we comprehend what we are reading. That is being able to understand and remember what we have read when finished. Today we are going to learn about summarization which is a comprehension strategy that we use to pick out the most important parts of what we read.
  2. There are five important steps we use when summarizing. I will write them on the white board so everyone can see them and also give each one of you a book mark that you can keep with you and use when you are reading. First we will pick out the important parts of what we read. Next we pick out and take away the parts that are less important. Then we use key words to help us pick out the details of what we read. Then we think of one topic sentence which summarizes the most important part of out reading.
  3. Now we are going to practice out new summarizing strategies. We are going to read an article silently to ourselves and use our book marks to help us what to do when reading. This article is about a meteorite that crashed into a house in New Zealand let’s read the rest of the article to see what happens to the house and more about the meteorite. We need to remember the important things in the article so we can make a good summary when we are finished.
  4. We will summarize the first paragraph as a class so the students can ask questions and they can see what a good summary looks like. Be sure to model the five steps for the students. “When I read this paragraph, the important things that I remember are that a grapefruit size meteorite crashed through a roof and that the house was in New Zealand. Be sure to ask the students if they came up with any other answers. After we pick out the most important things, we are going to get rid of the unimportant details. I found these to be that the meteorite slammed into a couch, hit the ceiling, and rolled under the table. Next we will pick out some key words that are important to the paragraph. The ones that I picked are grapefruit sized, meteorite, roof, and New Zealand. Now lets write a topic sentence for this paragraph. I think that A grapefruit sized meteorite crashed through the roof of a house in New Zealand. Sounds like a great sentence as the topic for our paragraph.” Be sure to ask the students if they have any questions about what we did or if they have any other ideas of what we could have written.
  5. If there are no questions have the students try it themselves. “Now that we are all so good at summarizing lets practice with the next paragraph doing it by ourselves. Just raise your hand if you have any questions. Make sure to all five steps and only use the important details.

 

Assessment:

I will collect the students summarizes review them and then review them with the students, having them tell me why they choose what they did to write. In their summaries they should have three important things from the article, at least three key words from the paragraph, and a topic sentence that clearly summarizes the article. And then make suggestions for them.

 

Sources:

 

“Space Rock Makes a Crash Landing.”  Staff.  National Geographics Kids Magazine. 
    http://news.nationalgeographic.com/kids/space.html  18 April 2005.
 
Melton,Shealy.Summin’ItAllUp
   http://www.auburn.edu/rdggenie/connect/meltonrl.html
 
Vest,Amy. What’stheMainIdea??  
    http://www.auburn.edu/rdggenie/breakthrough/vestrl.html


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