It’s Time to Sum It Up!!!

Lauren Barrowclough

Reading to Learn

Rationale:  Comprehension is an important strategy for students to understand as they read.  One of the most important strategies for children to learn is summarization.  Summarization can be defined as finding the most important information from a reading.  In this lesson students will use their summarization skills by picking out main events or ideas while reading a chapter in a book.

Materials:  enough copies of the "SuperCroc" article from National Geographic for Kids magazine (March 2002 issue) for each student, paper, pencils, and chalkboard, informational books for each student (of their choice), story map for board,

Procedures:

I will start out by reviewing what silent reading is to my students.  “Silent reading is a great way to understand what you are reading.  As you read to yourself you are able to gain a lot of information and comprehend what you read.  After you read silently to yourself you want to make sure you comprehended everything.  We are going to use summaries to make sure you comprehended the text correctly.  You write a summary by picking out the main points in a story or passage.

 First I will give each student a copy of “SuperCroc” from the National Geographic for Kids magazine a book.   “Today we are going to read an exciting article about crocodiles.  “I am going to read the first paragraph of the article to you and I want you to follow along while I read.   After reading the first paragraph I am going to have everyone help me write a paragraph describing the information we just read.  Be sure to pay close attention as I read so you can get information for our paragraphs.”  After reading I will ask the students what important things we discovered as we read the first paragraph of the article.

“Now I want you to read the rest of the article to yourself silently and I want you on your own to write a summary of what happened in this article.  After everyone is done you will write your own paragraph describing what you just read.”

 “Now that everyone knows how to summarize a article, I want you to get an informational book of you choice from the library and read the first chapter.   I will make sure that the students are reading books on independent level.  I will have them hold up a finger for every word they do not know.  If they have more than two fingers up then the book is too difficult for them and they need to choose another book.   After reading your book to yourself silently I want you to write three main important things that happened in your story map.”

Assessment:  I will pick up each students paragraphs and see if the information they put on them is correct.  This will allow me to see if they were able to comprehend what they read to themselves and if they still need to work on comprehension strategies.

References:

“Summing Up SuperCroc” By: Meg Crow Reading Genie Website: 
http://www.auburn.edu/rdggenie/elucid/crowrl.html

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