Rationale: In order to be a successful reader, you must read to comprehend and learn from what you have read. This lesson is designed to introduce students to the strategy of summarization. They will learn to pick out the main ideas of a story rather than picking out every little detail. By the use of summarization students will learn to delete information that is less important in a story and recall only the main ideas to better understand the deeper meaning. This lesson will guide students in eliminating unnecessary details of a passage and picking out the important details.

 

Materials:

Smart board

Poster with summarizing rules

Time for kids Dolphin article (1 per kid)

Time for kids Taj Mahal article  (1 per half the kids in the class)

Time for kids fossil find article (1 per half the kids in the class)

Highlighters (1 per kid)

Pencils (1 per kid)

Lined paper (1 per kid)

 

 

Procedures:

1. Say: How many of you have read a book so good that you wanted to tell your friend all about what you just read? (allow students to answer/raise hands) Me too! But we know that we can’t tell our friends what happened word for word. That is why we use a strategy called summarization to tell them about our story. Does anyone know what it means to give a summary of a story or passage? (allow children to answer) Yes! Summarizing is when you tell someone only the important and meaningful things of a story instead of retelling the whole story.

2. Say: There are a few rules to summarizing that are very important. First, it is important that you remove all the information that is not important. Then you highlight the information that is important and last you write a topic sentence including all the important information.  (provide poster with these 3 rules on it)

3. Say: We can summarize many things. We can summarize books, articles, stories or even events that happened real life.  I am going to give you the chance to practice summarizing an article! (pass out dolphin article from Time for kids, give students a few minutes to read article)

4. Say: Now that we have read our passage, the first thing we need to do is look at our summarization rules. The first rule is to delete the unimportant information. This means to go through the passage and cross out any extra information that we do not really need to know. I'm going to read back through the passage and see if there are any sentences that tell us things that are not very important. I'm going to use the SmartBoard, but you use your pencil to cross out any information that you do not thin is very important to know from the article.

5. Say: Now that we have marked out the unimportant information, we look at step 2 on the rules chart, who can read rule number 2? (call on someone to read the rule) Rule number 2 is to highlight the important information. Since the unimportant information has already been crossed off, the important information will be easier to find. (pass out highlighters to each student)

6. Say: Finally, our last rule is to make a topic sentence (point to the chart). This part can be a little tricky. The topic sentence is supposed to provide a very short, clear description of what we read. We do not want to include every detail, but we want to provide enough information that tells us we remember what we read. Take a look at the important information we highlighted and come up with a topic sentence that gives us an idea of what our passage was about (walk around and give students assistance with this).

7. Say: Who wants to read their topic sentence for the class (have a few students tell their topic sentence to the class and give constructive criticism/ praises to each student)

8. Say: Now I want everyone to get with a partner (allow students to pair off). I am going to give one of the people in your group an article about the Taj Mahal, and the other partner an article about a fossil finding. I want you to do exactly what we just did with the Dolphin article, following the steps of summarization on the board (pass out articles)

9. Say: I want you to create a good topic sentence because it is your job to effectively what you have learned to your partner after each of you is finished creating your topic sentence. 

 

Refrences:

Swim with sharks and summarization Reading to Learn Design, Jessica Perry

http://jmp0052.wixsite.com/jessica-perry/readingtolearn

Speedy Summarizing, Katie Oliver http://kaitlinoliver.wixsite.com/ctrdlessondesigns/reading-to-learn

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Turning Green article https://www.timeforkids.com/g2/turning-green/

Fossil Find article https://www.timeforkids.com/g2/fossil-find-2/

A New Home article https://www.timeforkids.com/g2/new-home-3/

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Questions email: Delaney O'Brien

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