Flipping over Summarization

by Morgan Pierce 

Rationale: As students become more fluent in their reading, they begin to build their comprehension. Comprehension helps readers gain meaning from the text.  Students may advance this skill is by learning to summarize text.  In this lesson students will discover how to effectively summarize a passage they have read. This will provide them with a new tactic to help improve their comprehension.

Materials:

-Summarization rubric for student--put on a bookmark:

       _____ Pick out a topic sentence

       _____ Find important details

       _____ Remove information that it needless

       _____ Find repeated ideas and remove them

-Large writing tablet

-Pencil for each student

-2 Highlighters for each student (different colors)

-Paper for each student

-A copy of The Secret Language of Dolphins for each  child

-A copy of Giant Jellyfish Invasion for each child.

Procedure:

1. Introduce the lesson: "Today we are going to learn how to summarize.  What is summarizing? Yes, it is when we pick out the most important parts of a story and put them all together.  We also remove any information that is not important to the main idea. Today, I want your goal to be to identify, or find, the important information and cross out the unimportant information."

2. Go over the bookmark. "How can we make sure we use these steps as we read? We can use different color highlighters to mark out topic sentence and our important details, and then we can mark out the unimportant details or repeated ideas with our pencil."

3. Model:  "Summarizing can be complicated, so let's learn how to do it together.  Everyone get out their highlighters, pencils, and the copy of The Secret Language of Dolphins.  This article talks about how dolphins communicate with each other. Let's read to find out how they can talk to one another and what they might talk about."

4. "I would like everyone to read their article silently and use your highlighters and pencils to follow our steps on the bookmark."

5. After they have finished reading, ask the students to share the information they have gathered (important details, unimportant details, repeated information, and the topic sentence). Go in order from the bookmark. Walk them through what you did. Make a chart sorting this information and write it up on the large writing tablet as they share it.

6. "Now we have our information in a neat format on this paper. Let's put it together to sum up the article we just read." Walk the students through writing this summary. Put the information you have gathered into two-three sentences.

7. "Now it is your turn. Read Giant Jellyfish Invasion, use your bookmarks and follow those steps, then write your own two-three sentence summary."

Assessment: I will informally assess the students by observing them as the perform the steps from the bookmark and through listening to what that provide during our group summarization. I will formally assess the students by taking up their summaries of the second article.

Reference:

 Michaela King

http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/reading_genie/journeys/kingrl.htm

National Geographic. Giant Jellyfish Invasion. http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/Stories/AnimalsNature/Giant-jellyfish-invasion

National Geographic. Secret Language of Dolphins. http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/Stories/AnimalsNature/Giant-jellyfish-invasion

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