Reading to Learn | lessondesigns

Reading to Learn:

Learning to Balance Summaries

Rationale:

This lesson is designed to help students use the skills they have already acquired to summarize what they read. Now that students are able to recognize words automatically and read passages fluently, we want them to begin understanding what they read and pick out the important parts of their readings. The lesson will teach reading comprehension using research-based procedures that are proven to work in educational experiments. In order for children to learn about what they read, they must first learn to summarize. Students will learn to summarize by finding the most important information that they read in the article “Balancing Act.”

Material:

Class set of the article, “Balancing Act” http://www.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=8052
List of vocabulary words from the article to show on projector
Summarization Checklist
Pencil and paper
Highlighter
Comprehension questions

Vocabulary words:

trek- a journey or trip, especially one involving difficulty or hardship
- The trek up the mountain was long and exhausting.
rearing- to take care of and support up to maturity
- The mother was rearing her child in order to help the child to become independent.
frigid- very cold in temperature
- I decided to play inside my warm house instead of play outside in the frigid snow.

Summarization Checklist:

(Each item is worth 2 points apiece.)

Did I…

_____ write a topic sentence?

_____ include important information?

_____ leave out unimportant information?

_____ provide supporting details to help explain my summary?

_____ write complete sentences?

Comprehension Questions:

How do penguins prepare for their long journey to raise a family?
Does the mom or the dad take care of the egg?
While penguins are taking care of their eggs, is the weather normally hot or cold?

Procedures:

“Have you ever read a book and wanted to tell a friend what the book was about? How did you choose what information to include when you told your friend about the story? There probably wasn’t enough time to read the whole story to your friend, so I bet you gave a short explanation that described the important parts of the story. That is called a summary. On order to summarize a story, we need to decide what parts of the story are important. Good readers use summarization to help them understand what an article or a book is about. We cannot remember everything that we read. That is why we summarize.”
“Before we practice summarizing an article, I want everyone to learn three new vocabulary words. These words came from the article we will be reading today. Everyone pull out your pencil and paper, and write down these words, their definitions, and the sentence provided.” (Show words on projector.)
“Now let’s take a look at our “Summarization Checklist.” (Pass our checklist.) Who can read me the first thing on our checklist? (Call on student with hand raised. Do this for each item on the checklist.) Very good. We need to make sure to include a topic sentence that describes what we are writing about. Who can read the next line on our checklist? Correct. We need to include the important information that we read in order to summarize the article. Who can read the third item on our checklist? Nicely done. If we include the less important information from the article we read, our summary gets very long. Who can read the fourth item on our checklist? Good. We need to provide information that we read in our article in order for our summary to make sense. Who can read the last item on our checklist? Nicely done. Summaries are not supposed to be very long. We can write a summary in as little as one sentence. But for now, I want everyone to try to summarize using 3-5 sentences.”
“Everyone pull out the article, “Balancing Act.” This article is all about how penguins prepare for their eggs to hatch so they can have new additions to their families. How do you think penguin prepare while they wait for their egg to hatch? Let’s begin by reading the first two paragraphs together so we can find out. I will read them to you."

Year after year, emperor penguins of Antarctica set out on a journey. They march across the ice as far as 70 miles. Why do emperor penguins travel so far? One of the main reasons the penguins march these great distances is to raise their families.

Before their journey can begin, the penguins first feed on large amounts of fish. Since they will be walking for miles away from water, they will not be able to eat. So, the penguins must store up as much fish as possible.

“These paragraphs provide a lot of information. We want to figure out what the article is about. But remember, to summarize we do not need all of it. Let me highlight the important parts of these paragraphs. Do it with me. We’ll begin by looking at the first sentence. “Year after year, emperor penguins of Antarctica set out on a journey.” Hm. They set out on a journey. I think that is important to know. Let’s look at the next sentence. “They march across the ice as far as 70 miles.” This is good factual information, but in order to summarize we do not always need specific fact. Let’s keep going. “Why do emperor penguins travel so far? One of the main reasons the penguins march these great distances is to raise their families.” It is good to know why the penguins are traveling. I am going to highlight, “to raise their families.” We are all done with the first paragraph. Now let’s look at the second paragraph. It is only three sentences, so I think we can summarize the whole thing. “Before their journey can begin, the penguins first feed on large amounts of fish. Since they will be walking for miles away from water, they will not be able to eat. So, the penguins must store up as much fish as possible.” It is important to note that the penguins are eating so much because they will be traveling far from their food source. I am going to highlight the entire first sentence. I will also highlight “they will be walking for miles away from water” in the second sentence.”
“Now that we are done highlighting the important information, it’s time to write our summary. First, we need our topic sentence. The topic sentence is the main idea of the article and explains what we will be writing about. To create our topic sentence, we need to look at the parts of the article that we highlighted. A good topic sentence for this article would be, “Penguins go on long excretions in order to start their new families.” This is a good topic sentence because it introduces what we will be talking about in the rest of our summary.”
Now that we have a topic sentence, we can begin writing the rest of the summary. My next sentence will say, “The penguins prepare for their trips by eating a lot of fish, since they will be traveling far away from their source of food.” That is a good explanation of what we just read.”
“Now I want you to practice summarizing each paragraph by yourself. Highlight the parts that you think are important, then include the information in your summary. Look back at your checklist to make sure you have completed each step. When you are finished, I want you to turn your work in to me.”

Assessment:

Review each child’s summaries and make sure they have completed each part of the “Summary Checklist.” Make comments about their summaries, but do not take off points unless they did not include items on the checklist.
When everyone is finished, ask the comprehension questions and have the class answer them out loud.

References:

Amber Glass, Summarizing with the Big Cats: http://ang0018.wixsite.com/mysite/reading-to-learn

Susanna Fields, Superstar Summarization: http://susannafields95.wixsite.com/literacylessons/reading-to-learn

Article: http://www.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=8052

Click here to return to the Horizons index.