Supplementary Material
Rationale: When a student becomes fluent with his or her readings, he or she can now focus on the comprehension of the text rather than decoding. Comprehension is the ultimate goal of reading, and a necessary skill. Readers can improve their comprehension by learning strategies (such as summarization) that will help them learn from the text. This lesson will engage young readers in practicing summarizing by instructing, modeling, scaffolding, and checking for understanding when properly summarizing.
Materials:
Class set of writing paper
Class set of pencils
Class set of erasable highlighters
summarization checklist
Class set of blue papers with dotted lines down and across the middle
Class set of book Whales by Vic Mooress (link at bottom)
Overhead
Poster with 4 summarizing rules
Procedures
1. Today we are going to start by raising your hand if you think you know the answer to this question... What does the word ‘comprehension’ means? Very good! Comprehension is when we understand what we are reading. Sometimes, we try to read a book so fast that we forget to pay attention to what the story is all about. Just like we learned last week about improving our fluency, even if you can read quick we want to make sure we are comprehending what we read.
2. Today we are going to learn a new strategy that will help us with comprehension, called summarization. Summarization is when we we pick out the important details to form a shortened version of the article or paragraph in our own words. Using this strategy will help us to eliminate the less important information and help us remember what is important so that we can ‘comprehend’ what we are reading.”
3. There are four main steps that we are going to talk about that will help us remember our new strategy of summarization." [Write steps on board for students to see]
4 Steps to Summarization
Delete and cross out less important details or repeated information.
Highlight keywords to help remember the important details
Put topics in correct order which they happened.
Put keywords and topics into one main topic sentence.
4. Now that we have talked about our strategy, lets make sure we can remember it. I need two friends to help me pass out these papers with the dotted lines. We are going to create a small booklet to remind us how to summarize. In each box, I want you to write the steps 1 to 4, on each page you need to draw a symbol to help you remember this step. I might draw X’s with step one, or color with my highlighter on step 2. Any symbol or picture that you think will help you to remember this step. [see example below] Then we are going to cut it out and bring it up to Ms. Haley for you to staple. Then you have this blue booklet to remind you how to summerize your text!
5. Using our newly learnt 4 rules, we are going to put this summary to work by reading some pages in this book called Whales. There are a few vocabulary words I want to review so we can make sure everyone is comprehending the information as best as possible.
Vocabulary list:
· meter
· comparison
· migrate
· polar
-Let's look at what the word meter means. A meter is a unit of measurement used for something very large. We all know what a foot is, well a meter is about 3 times as long.
-What are some things that you can measure in meters? … [show images] A door is about 2 meters tall, our chalk board is about 4 meters long. What can you think of?
-In our reading, we will learn about how many meters a whale is.
- Model a sentence: In Physical Education today, everyone had to run the 100 meter dash as fast as we can
- Now that we have read, can you think of how you would use the word meter?
[ This is repeated for every vocabulary word ]
6. Everyone pull out your copy of Whales. Today we are going to learn about Whales! Whales are such an interesting and large animal, you may have a real Whale in sea world before or maybe you have seen a picture of befor. If you haven’t let’s take a look at the cover of this book. As we open up to the first page of the book, we are going to learn more about our Whale! Can I have a friend who can help read page one aloud as everyone else follows along at their desk? Great, now I am going to model how we were would summarize this [model using the blue booklet of 4 steps]. Now you have watched how I summarized a paragraph, it is your turn! Let’s turn to page 21 with the big popping out of the bright blue water. Now I want you to use your blue booklets to use the four steps to create the topic sentence summary for this paragraph.
7. Assessment: I will collect the student’s individual responses of their summary and use the summarization checklist (at the bottom of the page) to assess for the 4 steps of summarization. I will also conduct a group discussion about whales with some review questions to confirm comprehension.
References:
- Whales by Vic Moores, https://www.raz-plus.com/books/leveled-books/book/?id=121&lang=English
- Set Sail with Learning by Rachel Smith, http://rs4179.wixsite.com/mysite/reading-for-learning
- Readers are Leaders by Halley DeLitle http://hzd0007.wixsite.com/delightful-reading/reading-learn
HOW WHALE CAN YOU SUMMARIZE?
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