Reading to Learn:"Summarization Made Easy"

Rationale: Summarization is something every reader needs to be able to master. Summarization helps students find meaning in what they are reading. Students should be taught how to pull key points out of a story and put all these key points together to form a summarization. Summarization helps students understand and learn about what they are reading much more efficiently and deeply.

Materials: Copies of the article "Coral Reefs" from Ranger Rick magazine, highlighters, paper and pencil for each student.

Procedure: 1) Start by telling the student s about the importance of summarization. "Today we are going to read something and summarize what we read. Summarization is when we read something and then pull out key information from what we read to make it shorter. Summarization helps us understand what we read in a faster way. Summarization helps us get what is important from what we read. Listen tom me read this passage and then summarize it. I asked my parents for a new dog. They said yes. I went to the pet store. Then I bought a little brown cocker spaniel. Now let me summarize what I said,
I wanted a new dog so my parents let me go to the pet store and get a cocker spaniel. See that was much shorter but I still got all the main points. Now we will do this with an article ourselves."
2) Pass out copies of the article. Have students read the article silently and carefully. "Read the article carefully and make sure you try and get all the key points.
3) Have students get with a partner and discuss key points they should highlight. (Give students the highlighters.) "Now get with your partner and talk about what things you think are important in the article and should be highlighted and highlight these facts"
4) "Now everyone get out some paper and write down the facts you highlighted. Only write the things highlighted. Do not write the facts that are not highlighted."
5) "Get with a different partner and read your summaries to each other. See if they are similar. See if you can help each other make your summaries better or if you left any key information.  You can write any left out information at the bottom or rewrite a sentence at the bottom also."
Assessment: Have the students rewrite their summaries and turn them in. Make sure to tell the students to check the summaries carefully for left out information. Also tell students to make the summaries as short as possible without t leaving out any key information.

Reference: Eldredge, J. Lloyd. Teaching Decoding in Holistic Classrooms.  (1995). Prentice Hall.
 www.rangerrick.com "Coral Reefs." Ranger Rick Magazine.  1996-2003 National wildlife Fedreration.

Click here to return toOpenings.