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Waddling into Summarization!

Reading to Learn Design

Rationale: Now that your students are fluent readers you must teach them how to comprehend what they are reading. One way to tell if a student comprehends his reading is if he can summarize what it is that he’s read. Summarizing shows students the importance of using a graphic organizer- to only focus on the material of the story that is useful to learning.

Materials: Pencils and paper, highlighters, white board, dry erase marker, sheet of blank paper for summarizing rules, sheet of lined paper for summarizing articles, copies of the Highlights magazine (one per student, one for teacher) containing the article A Passion for Penguins, overhead camera

Procedures:

  1. Say: Who’s ready to learn how to summarize an article? Summarizing is a way for us to understand what we reading after reading it. To summarize, we will narrow the read material down to only the important parts. I have found an article that I find very interesting and that will be good to practice this on. Let’s look for the most important idea and the phrases that support it in this article so we can get the rest of it out of the way.

  2.  Say: Now that everyone has a piece of paper we will begin going over the rules. Write on your paper the rules that I am writing on the board. These rules will help you summarize as you read the article. 

  3. Say: Rule one is to get rid of the sentences and words that repeat themselves. Rule two is to not put too much focus on events and dates. Rule 3 is to come up with a sentence of what you think the writer of the article wants you to really get from this.

  4.  Say: The main idea should be supported by certain phrases that help you recognize it. (At the bottom of the students’ rule page they will write down some key points to remember in regards to summarizing. For instance, summaries should always be shorter in length than the information you are summarizing.)

  5.  Say: Let’s take out our Highlights magazine and turn to A Passion for Penguins. (book-talk) This article gives us a peek into the life of Amy Graves, an aquarium employee who loves working with all kinds of birds, but especially penguins. Let’s read to see what her job requires of her! Get with your usual reading partner and take turns reading paragraphs, remember to read in your inside voice…First, let’s help each other find the phrases that aren’t very important to our main idea. Since our article focuses on what it’s like for Amy to work with birds, the first two sentences of our article aren’t very important to what Amy’s job with birds includes. Let's all take our pencil and cross that sentence out. Next, we need to highlight and locate important pieces of information in the text. Hmm…let’s see: I think that it’s pretty important to know what Amy does when she gets to the aquarium. We can highlight key phrases such as “makes sure the birds are looking well” and “hands out vitamins and food.” Talk about the important points in the article that tells us about Amy’s job with your partner and highlight these phrases. Now, for the topic sentence. After we cross out everything that isn’t important to us, we can use our topic sentence and the information that we have left to write our summary. For this article, our topic sentence could be something like “Amy Graves loves taking care of the birds at her job.” On your own paper, write the topic sentence and the rest of the information that we have left in your own words.” Walk around the room and scaffold until the students understand completely.

  6.  Say: “After you’ve crossed out everything that doesn’t matter, written your topic sentence, and thought about what else you want to say in the summary I want you to start writing the summary paragraph. At the bottom of your article, write five new words you have never seen before you read this article and write their definitions-in your own words (what you think they mean based on the context within the article).” Scaffold this again but give the students space to figure out how to do this.

Assessment: Students will be assessed at the end on how well they did on their summaries. I will use this scoring rubric to grade their summaries for the correct information: Did the student in his or her summary…?

  • Begin by crossing out insignificant material? 

  • Organize like items and events together?

  • Decide on the topic/theme of the article and provide a sentence that covers this?

  • Select supporting details of the main topic/theme? 

  • List 5 new vocabulary words and their definitions (in students’ own words)?

 

I will also ask the students a series of comprehension questions to see if they read and understood the article:

  • What kinds of birds does Amy Graves work with?

  • What are three things Amy is responsible for at her job?

  • How does Amy’s job change during penguin breeding season?

  • How does Amy seem to feel about her job overall?

 

Resources:

Rachel Smith. Setting Sail to Learn, http://rs4179.wixsite.com/mysite/reading-for-learning

Highlights article A Passion for Penguins, https://www.highlightskids.com/audio-story/passion-penguins

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