Summing
It Up!
By: Lyndsey Tenney
Reading to Learn Lesson Design
Rationale: One of the most important
parts of reading is being able to efficiently comprehend the text. Without being
able to comprehend during reading, how would we be able to understand what is
happening in the story? In order to summarize, students will be required to
identify the main idea of the story and to note several facts that support their
main idea. This lesson is designed to teach students helpful ways to summarize
an article. By doing so, the students will be required to: take out information
that isn’t as important, reduce the size of the text into a more manageable
form, and to make a topic sentence.
Materials:
Article:
New Dolphin Discovered in Australia: Author Unknown- National Geographic
Kids
Article:
Crabs Clean Up
by: Catherine Clarke Fox- National Geographic Kids
Smart Board
Highlighters for each student
Pencil and paper for each student
Assessment checklist
Procedure:
1.
“In order to be the best readers that we can be, we must be able to fully
understand the words that we are reading. Today we will be practicing a new
strategy as we practice reading and this strategy is called summarizing. To
summarize something means to figure out what the main idea of the text is by
finding important details that are included. This can be done by noting what the
main idea of the text is, removing words or sentences that are not very
important, and identifying important facts that help support the main idea.”
“There
are a few important steps that should be followed when summarizing:”
1.)
Take out unimportant or repeated information.
2.)
Highlight or underline important information that you find.
3.)
Reduce the text into fewer words.
4.)
Create a topic sentence.
2. “Now I’m going to pass out a copy of an article and also pull it up on the smart board and we are going to use the four rules that I just listed to summarize this text. This article is called: New Dolphin Discovered in Australia. This article is about a new type of dolphin that has been discovered in Australia. Scientists and researchers have been working to tie together information to determine where this dolphin originates from. Before we being reading lets discuss some new terms that will be in this article that you may not be familiar with.
1.) Originates: Where a person or animal is originally from.
2.) Discovery: a person, place, or thing that has been found.
3.) Researchers: people who study information on a certain person, place, or thing.
Now let’s read to find
out all the information they have learned about this dolphin so far! I want
everyone to follow along with me as I read this text.” (Read text to students as
they follow along)
4.
“After reading this do you see any part of this text that is repeated or
unimportant?” (Have students raise their hands and take suggestions. Clarify to
the class whether their classmates’ suggestions are correct or not and why they
did or didn’t work and explain to the students which parts should be marked
out.) “Let’s
take our pencils and cross out that first sentence in the second paragraph, the
third paragraph, and then last paragraph”
(Mark out the text with the pen on the smart board along with the students so
they are clear which part of the text should be taken out.)
5.
“Now,
we are going to search for important information that we see in this article.
(Have students raise their hands to give suggestions. The important pieces of
information in this text are mainly in the first, second, and fourth paragraph.)
“Now that we have noted some sentences or phrases that are rather important, we
are going to take our highlighter and highlight those parts.”
-
“It’s
now time to reduce our text into fewer words. Pull out a piece of paper and
pencil. I’m going to freeze the screen on the smart board as I type into a word
document what we have highlighted and we can put those facts into sentence
form.”
6.
“Now we are going to create our topic sentence.
As mentioned earlier, a topic sentence should sum up the main idea of our text
into one sentence.
After reading this article, we know that tiny crabs help
clean the coral so that it does not get damaged and it can stay alive. Maybe our
topic sentence should focus on that main idea. Use your thinking caps to help me
come up with a sentence with that information. (Possible sentence:
Tiny crabs help keep coral reefs alive by
cleaning dirt that builds on them.) Now we can use our topic sentence and
the sentences we highlighted to make our summary. On your own paper, write the
topic sentence and then our highlighted information in your own words. (Walk
around room to observe writing.)
7. “Since
you now have a better understanding on how to summarize, I’m going to let you
try on your own! I am going to give you an article called New Dolphin Species
Discovered in Big City Harbor. This article is about a new species of dolphin
that has never been seen before. The dolphin was seen in Australia! Many
researchers and scientists are working together to figure out exactly what part
of the world this dolphin came from and why this is our first time spotting it.
You are going to use the strategies we talked about to help you summarize this
article just like we did the other one. Remember, read the article first, cross
out information that is not important or repeated, reduce the parts into fewer
words, create a topic sentence, and write a summary in your own words.”
Assessment:
Give a check if this was evident in the student’s summary:
-Unimportant or repetitive information was removed _____
-The text was reduced into fewer words _____
-Important information was highlighted/ underlined _____
-The topic sentence was based on the main idea of the article _____
QAR’s
-What point was the author making about the topic? (putting together)
-Where were the dolphins found and why do you think they were found there?
(writer and me)
-What is different about these dolphins and how are they different from a
dolphin you have seen, heard, or read
about before? (writer and me)
-What is the name of the new dolphin and why did they give it this name?
(putting together)
References:
National Geographic Kids. Author unknown. "New
Dolphin Discovered in Australia". 19 September 2011. Web. 3 April 2012.
http://kidsblogs.nationalgeographic.com/kidsnews/2011/09/new-dolphin-discovered-in-australia.html
National Geographic Kids.
Catherine Clarke Fox. "Crabs Clean Up"
http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/kids/stories/animalsnature/crabs-clean-up/
Rebecca Tarleton, Super Summarizing.
http://www.auburn.edu/~rat0006/tarletonRTL.htm