That
About Sums It Up!
Lessons
for Teaching Summarization
Rationale:
The goal of this lesson is to teach students how to
summarize text they have read. It can be
difficult to pick out the significant parts to remember in a passage
while reading. By summarizing the text
read, the student’s
will be able to understand the main points of a reading better. This lesson will focus on comprehending and
learning how to segregate the important parts of a reading from the
less
important parts. This
lesson will introduce the concept of summarization,
and provide chances to practice what they have learned about
summarizing.
Materials:
1.
A chart with 5 summarization steps:
1.
Pick out important details that are needed in the story.
2.
Pick out
less important/repeated items and delete them.
3.
Use an
easy action term for a series of events.
4.
Pick out
the topic sentence.
5. Create a topic sentence if one does not
exist.
2.
One copy per student of the article,
“Cool Things about Elephants,” by Aline Newman (found at http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ngkids/0606/)
3.
One copy per student of the article
“A Big Day for America!” from National
Geographic News (April 13, 2007)
4.
Notebook Paper
5.
Pencils
6.
Sentence strip with Bob is fat written
on it
Procedure:
Step
1:
Today we will learn how to
read text and understand the meaning of the text by summarization. Before we talk about that, can anyone tell me
what it means to read silently? (Give students a chance to respond)
Those are
some great ideas. Reading silently is
kind of like whisper reading. Let’s read
this sentence together as a whisper read. Bob is fat.
Good job.
This time let’s read it less loud.
Great job now, can you read the sentence inside your head
without
opening your mouth? Good! That’s what
reading silently is; reading quietly to ourselves.
Why do you think we read silently? (Give
student’s a chance to respond) There can
be several reasons to read silently, but the main reason to read to
yourself is
to soak in and understand what you are reading.
Summarizing
what we are reading can help us comprehend what we are reading as well. Does anyone know what summarizing means?
(Give students a chance to respond)
Summarizing is when we pick out the most important parts of a
text and
leave the unimportant parts out when retelling the story.
This will make the text shorter allowing us
to remember only the main points. Now, who can tell me what
summarization
means? (Give students a chance to respond) Great job; it is when we
tell only
the important parts of a text. Next we
are going to take a look at 5 steps that will help us learn how to
summarize
texts that we read. We will also
practice summarizing.
Step
2:
Show the chart of the 5
summarization steps
5
summarization steps:
1.
Pick out important details that are needed in the story.
2.
Pick out
less important/repeated items and delete them.
3.
Use an
easy action term for a series of events.
4.
Pick out
the topic sentence.
5. Create a topic sentence if one does not
exist.
By
using these 5 steps you will find it
easier when trying to summarize a text you have just read.
Let’s walk through each step and talk about
how to use it. The first thing we will
do is pick out any details that look important in the story. Secondly, we will thumb through the less
important details or repeated items and eliminate them.
The third thing we will do is replace the
long lengthy statements with action words that have the same meaning.
The fourth
thing we will do is pick out what the topic sentence is.
Lastly, if there is not a topic sentence you
should create one that represents the text well.
Step
3:
Pass out the article “A
Big Day for America” from the National
Geographic News (April 13, 2007) to each student.
Tell the children to read the article
silently like we practiced reading earlier.
Step
4:
Now I am going to model
for you how to summarize a paragraph using the 5 summarization steps
that we
talked about on our chart.
The
first thing I will do is pick out
the most important parts of the paragraphs. - Why American was
celebrating,
where did America land, and what did the Americans leave behind. Next, I remembered key words like 400th
Anniversary, 1607, Jamestown, and British colonies.
The final step I did was choosing a topic
sentence; “America recognized a 400th anniversary in May,
2007.” Listen as I read my summarization
of the first four paragraphs.
“In
May, 2007, American recognized a 400th
anniversary. Colonists arrived in Jamestown, Virginia on May 13, 1607
and
created the first representative government in the British colonies.”
Step
5:
Next review the 5 steps to
summarization to help the children remember the process.
In order to help the children know which
parts of the text is important ask questions about important parts of
the
article. Why is America celebrating in
this article? (Give students a chance to respond) Right; Americans are
celebrating their 400th anniversary.
What year or month did the colonists arrive in America? Good; it
was May
13, 1607. By asking the students
questions about important information, it gives them a better idea of
what to
be looking for while reading.
Step
6: Now
I want you to show me
how you can summarize something you read.
Here is a copy of an article from the National Geographic
Explorer
Classroom Magazine about Elephants.
Provide a book talk for the students by asking questions about
the
article. Do you think elephants can
remember things for a long period of time or a short period of time? Do you think elephants are large or
small? Are elephants gentle or
aggressive? Let’s read to find out! Remember to look back at you chart with the 5
summarization steps on it in order to help you summarize the text after
you
read it.
Step
7: After
you read this article, I want you to write a summary of what
you have just read. Think in your head
about important questions that you thought of while you were reading. Write down the essential parts of the text
and leave out the parts that you do not think are important. Again, remember to use your chart.
Step
8: While
the children are
reading and working on summarizing the information they have read, walk
around
the room to monitor the progress and help the children that ask for
assistance.
Step
9: Assess
what the students
have done by having them turn in their summaries to be looked at by you. What to look for:
1.
Does the
summary cover what the topic is talking about?
2.
Does the
summary have the most important details listed?
3.
Are unimportant
details are left out?
4.
Is there
a topic sentence that goes along with the reading was chosen?
References:
Terry,
Robin. National Geographic News: A Big Day for America.
April 13, 2007. http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/Stories/History/Jamestown
National
Geographic for Kids (2006).
Cool Things about Elephants.
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ngkids/0606/5.html.
Swanson,
Katie. Can You Bear To Summarize
It??? http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/reading_genie/sightings/swansonrl.html
Graves, Lindsay. I'm Thankful I can
Summarize!
http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/reading_genie/constr/gravesrl.html