The
Heart of Summarizing
Reading to Learn Design
Rationale: The goal of reading is comprehension. In order for students to
develop good comprehension, they must have comprehension strategies.
Summarization is one important life-long skill for reading. It simply means that
you are taking out all of the small details and focusing on the main ideas of
the passage. This lesson is designed to help students develop their
summarization skills. In this lesson we will be working on helping children
derive meaning and understanding from the texts they read. Students will
be able comprehend the meaning within the text and organize it in an informative
way. They will do this by learning how to identify the important ideas and
key details needed while eliminating the unnecessary details. After
understanding and highlighting which important parts throughout the paragraph
are needed to comprehend the reading, students can then learn how to organize
them in a way (into their own sentences) that will shorten the reading but allow
for easier comprehension in the end.
Materials:
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Poster with Summarization Rules:
o
Get rid of unimportant information.
o
Get rid of repeated information
o
Substitute umbrella words for list words.
o
Select a topic
o
Make up a topic sentence if there is not one
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Articles- Bottlenose Dolphin, African Elephant
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Sum it up worksheet
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Pencil for each student
Procedures:
1. I will introduce the lesson by telling the students that we are going to
learn about the heart of summarizing. "Today we are going to be learning
about a really helpful strategy to use while reading, called summarization.
Can anyone tell me what summarization is? Good job! Summarization
means to take all of the important ideas out of the passage to get the main
idea.
2. Now it is time to review some of our vocabulary words. "Lets go over a few
more things before we get started. I want to go over some vocabulary words."
Write the following words on the whiteboard: Grasping,
Elongating, predator, emerge. "Let’s look at the words "emerge". Emerge means to
come into view. The tadpoles emerge out of the water and become bullfrogs.
Finish this sentence please:
Tadpoles ______ out of the ________. To emerge means to ________, and the
tadpoles turn into ___________. Continue using these same steps with the rest of
the vocabulary list.
3. After we review the vocabulary I will display the poster with the
summarization rules on it. I will then read and explain the rules to the
students. "These are the rules that we are going to use to summarize
passages that we read. They will help you to better understand the
text. The first rule is to get rid of unimportant information. This means all
the "common sense" information that we probably already know. Second is to get
rid of repeated information. If you see a fact two or more times, we need to
just go ahead and eliminate it because we already know that. Third is to group
any list of words into a big word. For instance, we would put this list (dog,
cat, bird, pig) under animals, instead of listing all of those again. The
fourth rule is to select a topic. This is so easy. It means you pick what the
article is about. Our article is going to be African Elephants. It is the
overall theme of the passage. Finally, we need to make that topic into a
sentence to start our paragraph off right. We would say, "This article is about
African Elephants." Does anyone have any questions about the summarization
rules?"
4. Next I will model how to use the summarization rules. Direct the
students' attention to the poster with the "African Elephants" paragraph on it.
"I am going to show you how to use these summarization rules as you read.
I am going to read this paragraph and I want you to follow along with me
silently. Then we will write a topic sentence and summary of this article
together."
5.
Read the paragraph aloud: "When you think elephant, you probably think trunk. An
adult African elephant's trunk is about seven feet (two meters) long! It's
actually an elongated nose and upper lip. Like most noses, trunks are for
smelling. But they're also for touching and grasping."
After reading the passage aloud, model how to go through the summarization
checklist. "Okay, now that we have read the passage, let's summarize it
together using our summarization checklist. The first rule says to get rid
of all of the unimportant information. To get rid of the unimportant
information, we are going to cross it out on the board. First I am going
to mark out " like most noses, trunks are for smelling" because this part is
pretty much common sense. We know that noses are used to smell." The next step
is to delete any repeated information. There is no repeated information in
this passage, so we can go on to the next step, which is to substitute umbrella
words for list words. This passage does not list any words that could be grouped
and substituted with an umbrella word. Now we need to decide on the subject of
this passage, which are African Elephants. Finally we need to write a
topic sentence. The topic sentence that I am going to write for this
passage is "African Elephants have a unique feature that they use to smell,
grasp and touch things. It is called their trunk." This is how we use the
summarization rules to get the important facts from the passage.
6. Now that you have seen how to use the summarization rules, I want you to
practice doing one on your own. I will pass out the sum it up sheet and
ask the students to get out a pencil. I am going to give you an article called,
"Bottlenose Dolphins". I want you to read it silently to yourself and use the
tools that I have given you (crossing out unimportant information) as well as
the summarization rules to summarize the passage. When the students have
received their sheet, I will ask them to work on it individually and then with a
partner, and I will ask them to follow the directions on the sheet.
7. For the assessment portion of this lesson, I will review the sum it up sheets
that were given to the students. Students will be evaluated on their ability to
delete trivial information as well as the repeated information, find the
important information, and create one topic sentence.
Sum it up Worksheet:
http://www.readingquest.org/pdf/sumitup.pdf
8. Finally I will ask for volunteers to share their summaries and generate a
class discussion to be sure that all of the students have comprehended what they
have read.
References:
Kids National Geographic Website: Animals and Pets
http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/kids/animals/creaturefeature/african-elephant/
http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/kids/animals/creaturefeature/bottlenose-dolphin/
http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/reading_genie/awakenings/carrollrl.htm
Strategies for Reading
Comprehension:
http://www.readingquest.org/strat/summarize.html