Its Raining Summaries! Oh my!
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Rationale
Reading is the first step for students to learn new information. While reading, it is crucial for students to differentiate between significant and insignificant information. In this lesson I will teach students how to summarize. Summarizing is a skill that beginning readers need to practice in order to be successful in reading comprehension. By practicing this, student can successfully find the important details of a text and remember the need to know information. This lesson is going to teach students the steps they can take in order to master summarizing large passages. I will model how to summarize an article read aloud to the class. Ending with the students practicing summarizing a new article independently and then being evaluated.
Materials
Welcome to the rain Forest! - Time for kids
Smartboard/projector copy of article
Handouts of article (1 per child)
Summary checklist (1 for each student)
Assessment checklist (for teacher – 1 for each student)
Summary Checklist
Did I…
_____ write my topic sentence?
_____ find supporting details to help answer the question?
_____ remove unimportant information by crossing it out?
_____ remove repeated ideas?
_____ create a 3-5 sentence summary?
Assessment Checklist
When summarizing, did the student… YES NO
Delete unimportant information? YES NO
Delete repeated information? YES NO
Organize items with a big idea? YES NO
Select a topic? YES NO
Write an inclusive, simple topic sentence to summarize the passage? YES NO
Procedures
1. Say: In today's lesson, we are going to be working on summarization. Can anyone tell me what summarization is? (Wait for answers) Summarizing is picking out the most important information in a text and putting it in a few sentences. By doing this, you can find the most useful information without getting confused by things you do not need to know. It can be extremely useful when reading a long book or article that is explaining something.
2. Say: Before we start reading, I want to talk about some words that we will encounter in the text that we might not know. These words are: habitat, understory, and predators. The first word is habitat. A habitat is the natural home or environment of a animal, plant or human. What is the habitat for fish you see at the beach? (wait for the answer ocean, sea). Yes! The fish live in the ocean making it their habitat. The second word is understory. Understory is the life that lives under the main canopy of the forest. Can anyone think of some animals that might live in the understory of a forest? (spiders, frogs, and worms ect). Our last word is predators. Predators is a animal that naturally preys on other animals. “The frog’s bright skin warns predators to stay away.” The bright skin of the frogs tells the predators that is is poison and not a good source of food.
3. Say: When we want to summarize a passage, we read a little bit at a time. When we finish reading that small part we look back and figure out the most important parts. We cross out information that does seem important to the main idea to the main idea. We must be very selective in choosing the important information.
4. Say: Now that we know what summarization is and why it is important, I am going to model how to do it. To summarize, I first use an article titled, Welcome to the Rain Forest. What kind of animals or things do you think we will find in this type of forest? Now we are going to read the article to find out the answer. Watch how I can summarize the first two paragraphs in the article. (Open Welcome to the Rain Forest! on the SmartBoard/projector OR have handouts for each student.) Remember I only want the important parts of each paragraph. First I am going to read the entire first and second paragraph.
Rain forests are warm and wet. This habitat is packed with green plants. It is home to unique animals. A rain forest has four layers. Study the drawing. What do you notice? What plants and animals do you see?
Jaguars are big and powerful. They live on the forest floor. The cats have a spotted coat. This helps them blend into the forest. The two-toed tree sloth spends most of its life hanging upside down. It lives in the rain forest canopy. A sloth has special claws. They help it grip tree branches.
These paragraphs give us some great information. What I am going to do is underline the important parts. We want to figure out what this article is about. Let's see. The first paragraph says that the rain forest is made up of four layers. In the drawing it lists the four different layers so I am going to write those down “Emergent, canopy, understory, and forest floor”. The second paragraph is talks about 2 animals. For the jaguar I am going to underline a few important words and phrases I’m going to underline “spotted, big, cat, forest floor”. These words I underlined describe the animal and where they live in the forest.
After I finish underlining I can put it all together to make a summary and it looks like this:
The Rain Forest is made up of four layers. The layers are Emergent, Canopy, Understory, and Forest floor. The jaguar is a big, spotted cat that lives on the forest floor.
5. Say: Now that we have a pretty good idea of how to summarize, let's try to summarize the next paragraph together.
The two-toed tree sloth spends most of its life hanging upside down. It lives in the rain forest canopy. A sloth has special claws. They help it grip tree branches.
What is the most important part of this passage? Let's underline the most important parts. What are some key words you want to underline? (Allow for students to voice their ideas.) (Encourage students to discuss what they believe are important points.) Suggest underlining- hanging, canopy, claws, tree.
Now that we have underlined words from our paragraph lets create a summary together;
(let them discuss and try on there own). Give them your example;
Two- toe tree sloths live in the canopy layer and use their claws to hang from trees.
Lets put all of our summaries we have so far together to see what we have.
The Rain Forest is made up of four layers. The layers are Emergent, Canopy, Understory, and the Forest floor. The jaguar is a big, spotted cat that lives on the forest floor. Two- toe tree sloths live in the canopy layer and use their claws to hang from trees.
6. Say: Now you are going to continue working on summarizing. I want you to read the rest of this article and underline the important points. Once you have finished, please come to the front to get a Summary Checklist. This will help you write a summary of the article using the underlined information. Do not worry if it looks short. The point of a summary is that it is a short description of an article. Once you have finished, turn to your neighbor to share your summary. See if there are any differences between your summaries and discuss them.
7. Call on individual students to come to the desk and answer a few comprehension questions about the text. Ask: how many layers of the rain forest are there? Name one of the layers? What are a few animals talked about in the article? Take up their summaries and use the assessment checklist to assess the summaries.
References
Grace Langhout, Super Fun Summarization.
http://www.auburn.edu/~gel0001/langhoutrl.htm
Welcome to the Rain Forest!- Time for Kids
