Flipping into Summarization
Reading to learn, Jessica Brown
Rationale:
When
students are in the upper elementary grades, it is crucial that they
have
comprehension skills. Summarization is a great way to assess
students'
comprehension by having them recall the important points from a passage
or
story. However, until students are provided with instruction on how to
summarize, many find it difficult to construct summaries on their own.
This
lesson will teach children through modeling how to summarize by
deleting
trivial and redundant information and focusing on the most important
information to create a summary.
Materials:
~
Copy of the article "A Rare Dolphin Discovery" from Time for Kids
magazine (April 3, 2009) for each student
~
Copy of the summarization checklist for each student
~
Paper
~
Pencil
~
Dry Erase Board and Marker
Procedures:
1.
Begin by discussing with the students that the purpose of reading
something to
understand it. Then, explain to them that there are several ways
to go
about comprehending a story and one way to do so is
summarization. Ask
them, “Does anyone know what summarization means?" Depending on
their responses, explain that summarizing is retelling something in our
own
words, but only including the main parts. Tell the students, "I
am
going to teach a few necessary steps that will help you begin to
summarize your
readings, and then we will practice summarizing some text together."
2. There are three easy steps to summarization. Write these steps on
the board
and explain them. Also, pass out these three steps in a checklist
format
so that the students can use it to follow when they are summarizing.
Step
1:
Keep the most
important details.
Step
2:
Get rid of the
less important details.
Step
3:
Write it in
your own words.
3. Next, pass out the article from Time for Kids magazine
titled "A
Rare Dolphin Discovery" to each student. Tell them, "You may
begin reading the article but, only read the first paragraph and when
you are
finished please look up at me."
4. Now, model for the students how to model the first paragraph.
Read the
paragraph out loud to the students and ask them to listen for the
important
information. Aloud, summarize the first paragraph for the
students on the
board, following the 3 steps above. (Ex. There were very rare
dolphins
found in Norway.) After modeling how to summarize the first
paragraph,
encourage the students to continue reading and to stop after every
paragraph
and write down the important information. Also, remind them to
use their
own words when they are summarizing and remind them to use the three
easy steps
to summarization to help them.
5. Let the students continue to read the rest of the article silently
and work
on their summarizations.
6. While the students are reading and working on their summaries, walk
around
and make sure that they are not having any problems and that they are
only
including the important details in their summaries.
7. Assessment: Take up the students summaries and check that they
only
kept the important details, got rid of the less important ones, and
used their
own words in their summaries.
Resources:
Lincoln,
Katie. "A
Splendid Summarization."
http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/reading_genie/invent/lincolnrl.html
"A
Rare Dolphin Discovery"
Time for Kids magazine.
April
10,
2006. http://www.timeforkids.com/TFK/news/story/0,6260,1181896,00.html