What's That You Say?

Summarization Lesson Plan
By: Rebekah Woods

Rationale: The ultimate goal of reading is comprehension. A good way to help children comprehend text is to summarize. Without the ability to summarize a story or event a child will have trouble understanding the main point or idea. Through teacher modeling specific strategies students can learn to expand their comprehension skills and summarize for themselves.

Materials:
A copy of the article "Black Rhinoceros" for each student
found at: http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/black-rhinoceros/

A copy of the article "Golden Eagle" for each student
found at: http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/birds/golden-eagle/

Poster with summarization rules on it:

Get rid of unimportant information
Get rid of repeated information
Select a topic
Write a topic statement that covers everything that is important from the passage of text

Highlighter
Pencil
Paper

 
Procedures:

1. Hello class! Who can tell me what the term summarization means? Excellent! It means to take the main or the most important ideas out of a passage. Summarizing will help you better understand what you just read.

2. For you to better understand what you have read I want us to all look at the poster with the "rules for summarization" on it. Going through each one of these steps will help you become better summarizers. (finish discussing the rules with the class)

3. I gave all of you a copy of the article "Black Rhinoceros" I want everyone to quietly read the article to yourselves and then I will read it out loud. Now that everyone has read it. I want everyone to get a highlighter and a pencil out. With the pencil we are going to cross out any information that seems unimportant. (for ex: The black rhino has a pointed upper lip, while its white relative has a squared lip, let the students give more lines or information that is unimportant.) Now I want everyone to highlight parts of the article that they think are important. (Once again let the students share what they highlighted and let them give their reason why they think it is important) In this article there is no repeated information. Our last step is to select a topic (Rhinos) and write our topic sentence (gather the important information from the students and put together the sentence).

4. I am going to pass out another article for you guys to read on your own and then I want you (following the summarization rules) to write a topic sentence for the article. In the article, "Golden Eagles" you will learn facts about the bird. It is the largest bird of prey in America and can dive at speeds of 150 mph to catch its prey, to learn more about the golden eagle you will have to finish the article.

5. For assessment the teacher will collect the summarizations the students wrote and compare it to the checklist below. If the students received a "no" then the teacher will discuss what they can do different next time to correct it.

References:

1. Chamberlin, Alison. What Did That Say?
http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/reading_genie/journeys/chamberlinrl.htm

2. National Geographic. Black Rhinoceros.
http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/black-rhinoceros/

3. National Geographic. Golden Eagle.
http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/birds/golden-eagle/

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