Leaving an
Important Message
Reading
to Learn
Rationale:
Comprehension is the goal of reading. A great strategy for
students to
use in comprehension is to summarize the information. In this
lesson
students learn to identify important and less important details of a
text in
creating a summary.
Materials:
Highlighter
(one for each student), Black Marker (one for each student), Copies of “The Secret Language of Dolphins,”
National Geographic
for Kids. Reported Crispin Boyer. April 13,
2009. (Enough so each
student has a copy.), "It was snowing when I looked outside this
morning. So I put on my heavy coat. I put my boots on
too. The
coat is black and the boots are red. I will stay warm." (Written
on
a chart.)
Procedure:
1. I will
start the lesson by saying, “Today we are going to learn some fun
skills that
will help us learn. These new skills will teach us how to read
something
know how to come up with a summary of the book that we have read.
A
summary is going to tell the important parts of the book that we are
going to
read. This will help us in understanding exactly what the story
was
about.”
2. “Follow
along with me as I read this paragraph and make a summary. “It
was
snowing when I looked outside this morning. So I put on my heavy
coat. I
put my boots on too. The coat is black and the boots are
red.
I will stay warm.”
3. “Now
let’s go through and highlight some important things in this
paragraph.
The main idea of the paragraph is that it was snowing and the person
put on
their warm clothes. Snowing is an important word so I am going to
highlight it, but the rest of the sentence is not that important so I
am going
to mark it out. We can also mark out the two sentences that
describe the
jacket and boots gear because it can be made into one. The colors
and
parts of the snow gear are important so I will highlight those.
Now I
have all the important parts of this paragraph highlighted in
yellow. I
can easily remember what the main idea of this paragraph is. Now
let’s
take all the highlighted information and make a short summary of this
paragraph.” Allow students to help you come up with a summary.
4. “Now
it’s your turn! This is an article from National Geographic for Kids
about The
Secret Language of Dolphins. Have you ever wondered how dolphins
communicate to each other? In this article we are going to figure out
how
dolphins can carry a message between them. I wonder how they do it? You are going to use your highlighter and
black marker when you read this article to yourself. Once you have read
the
article go back and highlight the important facts and use the black
marker to
cross through the non-important facts.
5. “Now
use the highlighted parts to make a summary of this article. Remember a
summary
is written in your own words and has only important information in it.”
6. “When
you are done share your summary with a partner. Talk about how they are
similar
and different.”
Assessment: Check each student's summary, and
answer
the following questions about each child:
-Was the student able to eliminate unimportant details?
-Was the student able to cut out redundant information?
-Was the student able to identify important topic words?
-Was the student able to identify the main idea of the article in a
topic sentence?
REFERENCES:
Collier,
Daniel “Summarization Squids.”
http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/reading_genie/odysseys/danielrl.html
National
Geographic for Kids – The Secret Language of Dolphins
http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/Stories/AnimalsNature/Dolphin-language