And the Point Is?

Reading to Learn Lesson Plan

aldriar@auburn.edu

Rebekah Aldridge

Rationale:

Students work very hard learning to read, but simply learning to read isn't good enough. Students must learn how to comprehend and remember what they read. Of course they don't have to remember everything they need, but they must learn to remember the high points of a passage. Summarization is one of the ways teachers teach students to remember passages. Summarization sums up the main ideas in a passage into one sentence. This lesson will help students learn how to summarize. They will learn how to pick out the most important information in a passage and use the summarization techniques to be able to remember these select facts.

Materials:

Copies of the article "Facts about Bald Eagles" by Scot Hoffman for each student and teacher (found at http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/Animals/CreatureFeature/Baldeagle)

Poster with summarization techniques on them:

1.) Get rid of the unimportant information.

2.) Get rid of repeated information.

3.) Superordinate items and events under one umbrella term.

4.) Select a topic

5.) Write a topic sentence that covers everything that is important from the passage.

6.) Poster with the paragraph on it from "Baby Boom! Giant Panda Cubs Give Hope to an Endangered Species" (this can be found at http://Kids.nationalgeographic.com/Stories/AnimalsNature/Giantpanda

"Scientist estimate that fewer than 2,000 giant pandas live in the mountains of central China. About another 200 giant pandas live in zoos and breeding stations, mostly in China. Giant Pandas are among the rarest of the world's living mammals."

7.) Paper

8.) Pencils

9.) Marker for each students

10.) Highlighter for every student

11.) Summarization Checklist

Procedures:

1.) Introduce the lesson. Today, we are going to learn a comprehension strategy. It is called summarization. This will help you remember what you read. Does anyone know what summarization is? Very good! Summarization is when you take the main idea of a story and separate it from the nonsense. When you summarize a passage, you understand and remember what you read better.

2.) Review fluency strategy. Can anyone tell me what we do when we have a hard time reading a word in a sentence? That's very good that you remember! We use the crosschecking method, to make sure that all the words in our sentence make sense. Like if we read this sentence (write this sentence on the board: "The dogs ran for the tennis ball.") like "The dogs ran for the teenis ball." then I would use my crosschecking skills and realize that there isn't such a thing as a teenis ball, but that it was supposed to read "The dogs ran for the tennis ball."

3.) Present the post with rules to the student. Everyone to comprehend and understand what we read, we can use these summarization rules right here on this poster. Read the rules to the students. Now everyone should have a copy of the article that is about Giant Panda Bears, I want everyone to take 10 minutes and read over the passage. After you finished reading, I am going to show you how to use these rules on the poster board to remember everything that you have read.

4.) Now I have put part of the article on a poster board. Is says: "Scientist estimate that fewer than 2,000 giant pandas live in the mountains of central China. About another 200 giant pandas live in zoos and breeding stations, mostly in China. Giant Pandas are among the rarest of the world's living mammals."The very first thing that I am going to do to summarize this passage is to get rid of the unimportant information. I am going to take my black marker and cross out that information. For example, I am going to get rid of "live in the mountains of central." I just need to remember that about 2,000 pandas live in China. There isn't any repeated information, but if there was we would then mark it out and if it was important highlight it once. The next step is to superordinate items and events under one umbrella term. I am going to highlight-"Another 200 pandas live in zoos and breeding stations. Giant pandas are amongst the rarest of the world's living mammals. The umbrella term is the rarity of the giant panda. The last but not least step is to write a topic sentence. My sentence will be: "Pandas are one of the rarest animals in the world, and about two hundred live in China in zoos or breeding stations." That's how you summarize a passage.

5.) Now I am going to pass out an article about the Bald Eagle from National Geographic for kids online. I want you to read it silently and then summarize the passage. Remember to use your marker to cross out the unimportant facts and highlighter for facts you want to remember. Give an article talk: "Bald Eagle's are really neat. They have a white head, but they don't have a white head until they are actually 4 or 5 years old. They can live till their 35 years old in nature. We'll have to keep reading to find out more fun facts." Also, after you have finished marking your paper with the marker and highlighter, remember to combine the important information into a topic sentence. When you have completed your summarization task, wait quietly at your desk until everyone is finished and we'll share them with everyone.

6.) To assess the students, use the checklist in the materials section to evaluate their summarization. Each child will be evaluated on their ability to delete trivial and repeated information, find the important information, and make a well organized summarized topic sentence. I will also ask comprehension questions to make sure the passage was understood.

References:

National Geographic for Kids (2008) Facts about Bald Eagles. http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/Animals/CreatureFeature/Baldeagle

National Geographic for Kids (2008) Baby Boom! Giant Panda Cubs Give Hope to an Endangered Species. http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/Stories/AnimalsNature/Giantpandacubs