Reading to Learn Lesson Design

Emma Kirkpatrick

 

Rationale: 

Summarization is an important part of comprehending text. In order to become better skillful readers, students must be able to find key points and main ideas throughout a story. The heart of summarization is superordinating predicate terms. This lesson will help students learn how to find the key points and separate the main ideas in a story in order to summarize a text after observing how the teacher models how to delete trivial information and pick out the important points.

 

Materials:

Summarization Rules on a poster:

1. Leave out unimportant information

2. Leave out repeated information

3. Pick out important information 

4. Find an umbrella term

5. Create a topic sentence 

SmartBoard

Cut out of hurricane symbol for each student 

Highlighter for each student.

Pen/pencil for each student.

Copies of the article “Hurricane” from National Geographic Kids for each student

Copies of the article “Taken by Storm” from Scholastic for each student

Comprehension Questions written on board

“Hurricane” Questions:

1. How long could a hurricane last?

2. How big could the eye be?

3. How can you prepare for a hurricane?

“Taken by Storm” Questions:

1. How long does hurricane season last?

2. What must a storm have to be considered a hurricane?

3. How do scientists measure a hurricane’s strength?

 

Procedures:

1. Say: “Today we are going to learn to summarize to become expert readers. Summarizing text helps us to better comprehend what we are reading. Can anyone tell me what it means to summarize when you read? [Students respond]. That’s right! When a reader summarizes the text, they read a passage or part of a text, are able to take the most important details and main ideas and use that information to retell what the story or passage was about. Do we mention every detail in the passage we read? [Students respond]. No! We only mention the most important details and main ideas, leaving out the unimportant small details. Summarizing text helps us to comprehend the information. Does anyone know what comprehend means? [Students respond]. To comprehend something is to be able to understand what you are reading and the meaning behind the story.” 

 

Review with the students the summarization checklist [on poster].

• Leave out details that are unimportant or trivial because that information does not help us understand the text to summarize. 

• Leave out details that are repeated because that text has already been used or seen and will lead to confusion.

• Pick out important information from the text because those important details and main ideas will help us to summarize the text to comprehend the message of the text. 

• Find an umbrella term for the events that happen in the text.

• Create a topic sentence that tells us what the text is about and mentions the main ideas presented in the text to introduce your summary.

 

1. Say: “Now, before we dive into summarizing, we are going to go over some vocabulary because we have to understand what words mean before we can comprehend the text’s message. Looking at the “Hurricane” article, let’s look at the first sentence under “How Hurricanes Form” that contains the word torrential. The sentence reads, ‘Some hurricanes roar onto land bringing punishing wind, torrential rain, walls of water, even tornados.’ This sentence tells me that torrential has something to do with the rain in the storm. Torrential means a lot, a large amount. There can be rain in many different types of storms but one that contains torrential rain means that it is a big storm containing a lot of rain. It is important to know this to know just how big and dangerous these types of storms can be. So, would a small summer storm have torrential amounts of rain? [Students respond]. No! Because in these storms there is not a lot of rain happening, also, these storms are not very dangerous. The fourth paragraph of this article contains the word meteorologists. Does anyone remember what a meteorologist is? [Students respond]. Right! Meteorologists are weathermen who predict weather and track storms to keep us safe.”

2. Say: “Now we are going to read an article on hurricanes. [Teacher pulls up article on SmartBoard and passes out the article to each student]. Let’s read the article silently and discuss it together. [Teacher and students read the article]. Some of my student helpers that have finished reading are passing out the hurricane symbol pictures. [Cut out distributed]. When you have finished reading, you can write down our Rules of Summarization from our poster on your cut out to help you remember the steps on how to summarize and mark your place in a book. I will go over the rules of summarization briefly before our discussion. [Teacher discusses summarization rules again]. I’m going to show you how I would summarize the “How Hurricanes Form” section of the article on hurricanes by following our summarization steps. First, we are supposed to leave out unimportant information. I would leave out the part of the second sentence when it says all of the specific things that damage the coastline. The things in this sentence are all things that were in the first sentence. Second, we are supposed to leave out repeated information. This goes to show that what we did in the first step was correct. Third, we pick out the important information to include in our summary. The first paragraphs talks about what hurricanes bring with them, the second paragraph talks about some of the effects of hurricanes, the third paragraph is not important, and the fourth paragraph talks about how their paths are predicted. My passage should look like this when I highlight important information and cross out unimportant or repeated information.” [Show highlighted passage on SmartBoard and allow students time to highlight their copy].

3. Say: "Now I want you to try and summarize the “Hurricane Vocabulary” part of the hurricane article. I will be walking around to help you and feel free to ask your classmates for help as well. Make sure you follow the summarization steps listed on the poster and on your bookmark. Use your highlighter to mark important text and use your pencil to cross out unimportant or repeated texts. From your important text highlighted, construct one topic sentence on what the passage was about. When you finish, share your summarization process (along with reasoning to support decision) and your topic sentence with a partner. When everyone finishes, we will discuss our findings with the class. [Students complete task]. What did you cross out as unimportant information? [Students share responses]. What did you highlight as important? [Students share responses]. What was your topic sentence/ [Students share responses]. Your marked paragraph should look similar to this. [Show my example of paragraph].”

4. Say: “To finish up our lesson on summarization, I am passing out our next article titled “Taken by Storm”. This article tells more interesting facts about storms in general. I want you to read the entire article, use the steps of summarization on the poster and your bookmark to guide your highlighting important information and crossing out unimportant or repetitive information, and construct a paragraph on the entire article using the highlighted information with a topic sentence. Use the answers to the questions of: What is the article about? What is the purpose of this article? If I told someone about this article, what would I say”. Answer the comprehension questions [on board] and complete the finish the sentence exercise on the board: Storms must have __________ to be called a hurricane. Remember to use complete sentence and correct punctuation.” 

5. For assessment, I will collect the student’s articles with the markings made, a paragraph with a topic sentence, and comprehension question answers. The summarization checklist rubric [table below] will be used to assess the paragraph students wrote on “Taken by Storm” on the following criterion: constructing a simple topic sentence, delete unimportant information, delete repeated information, include supporting details, and constructing a summary that includes the main ideas.

 

Summarization Checklist Rubric:

When summarizing, did the student…

Construct a simple topic sentence?                                  Yes/no

Delete unimportant information?                                     Yes/no

Delete repeated information?                                            Yes/no

Include supporting details?                                                Yes/no

Construct a summary that includes the main ideas?     Yes/no

 

References:

Hurricane Article

Taken by Storm Article

Anderson, Morgan, “Summarizing with Sea Turtles”

Storm Gif

 

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