Reading to Learn Design

Reading to Learn Design: Swimming Towards Summarization

Rationale: Reading is the initial step for students to learn new information. In order to become better readers, we must truly understand what we are reading. One way for beginning readers to improve comprehension is to learn how to summarize. To summarize is to take all of the important details and main ideas out of a text and combine them in a way that explains the story to someone who has not read it. This lesson helps students learn how to find those main ideas and key details in a text by having the teacher model summarization and then by summarizing themselves. The teacher will show the strategy of summarizing by explicitly modeling how to pick out important details and eliminate unimportant ones, and then guide students through summarizing their own passages. The students will be assessed on their summarization skills through comprehension questions.

Materials:

Pencils
Paper
Highlighter
Black colored pencil (or something to mark the passage with)
Dry-erase board, and dry-erase markers
Passage sample on SmartBoard from “National Geographic for Kids: Blue Marlin” [the first paragraph]
Classroom copies of full article “National Geographic for Kids: Blue Marlin;”
Rubric for summarization

Procedures:

Say: Today we are going to talk about summarization. What do you think it means to summarize a story? Summarizing means taking the most important details of a story and putting it in your own words. Important details would be things such as main ideas, important characters, important statistics, or really important things that a character does depending on what you are reading. When you summarize, you are retelling the story or passage, but leaving out all of the unimportant details. We use summarization with long books and articles because it helps you break it down into something more simple and easy to remember.

Say: I’ve given you an article from National Geographic about blue marlins. Blue marlins are one of the fastest fish in the world and there’s lots of cool and interesting facts about them that make them special. We’re going to read the first paragraph together, and I’ll show you how to summarize. Then you’ll get to summarize the rest of the article on your own! We’re going to be investigative scientists as we read this article and see what all we can learn about blue marlins that we didn’t already know. Follow along with me as I read the first page out loud.

Say: Okay, who can give me a brief summary of what you read? [Give different students a chance to give their summaries and assist as needed. Jot down some of their summaries on the board.] Let’s take a look at my copy of this paragraph on the SmartBoard. Notice how I highlighted important details and crossed out details that were not important. That helps me keep facts straight and the main idea in mind. [Model sample below on board.]

Explain: To review, the main topic or first sentence tells us what the paragraph will be about. Our first sentence talked about how a female blue marlin can grow up to 14 feet and more than 1,985 pounds. It’s important for us to know how much they weight so I highlighted the part of the sentence where it says exactly how much, but since we don’t know to know the meters or kilogram equivalent of that I crossed that out. That information isn’t necessary to me understanding the size of blue marlins. So, some information is more important than other information in a paragraph, identifying which information is helpful is going to help you summarize more effectively. Now I’m going to give you all a chance to try this on your own. Remember that there’s not always a black and white, right or wrong answers, so just do your best!

Say: Let’s read more about our friends the Blue Marlins. I am also giving you a black colored pencil and a highlighter. As you read, highlight details that you think are important and contribute to the main idea of the story. Take the black colored pencil and cross out the details that you think are unimportant and do not contribute to the main idea of the story. The main idea of this story is to give you more information on the blue marlins. There is a lot of information on the blue marlins, so pick facts that are main ideas. For example, where they live, what they eat, are they endangered, etc.

When you’ve finished reading and marking the story, I want you to summarize it in 6 sentences or less. Remember to only include main ideas and details. Don’t include any of the details that you crossed out, only the ones that you have highlighted. Write in complete sentences and use correct punctuation. The most important thing is not to copy the text just like it is but put it in your own words.

Before you read, let’s go over a little vocabulary that you’ll see in the passage so you’ll know what it means. [Write these on the board as well, with an example sentence so students may reference back.]

Predator – an animal that naturally preys on others. An example would be, “Sharks are predators because they are at the top of the food chain.”

Hatching – (of a young bird, fish, or reptile) emerge from its egg. An example would be, “The little chickens hatched from their eggs this morning.”

After students turn in their summarizations, I want you to come put your papers on the front table. Okay, now let’s get to reading and summarizing. [Allow 20-25 minutes for students to summarize.]

Assessment: