Reading to Learn
Spot on summarization
Rationale: Our goal for readers is to comprehend what they are reading so they can learn. Once students learn to read correctly and fluently, students can then move onto the next level. The next step is learning to read comprehensively in order to get the message of a text. In other words, children must learn to read to learn. They key component of reading to learn is being able to summarize. Summarizing teaches students how to delete the information that is not needed and use a graphic organizer.
Materials:
1. pencil (1 per child)
2. Paper (1 per child)
3. highlighter (1 per child)
4. Sheets of blank paper for try folds
5. Sheets of lined paper for summarizing articles
6. Copies of the article, “10 Giraffe facts!” by National Geographic Kids.
7. Copies of the article, “Giraffe” by National Geographic.
8. Rubric for grading summaries
Procedures:
1 Today we will be learning how to summarize the text in an article. Summarization is when you condense the information down to only what is important by deleting all of the unimportant and/or repeated information. We will practice how to do this with two articles. We will focus on what the main idea is, what facts support the main idea, and what information we can remove to make our understanding clearer.
2 I’m going to pass around a stack of paper and I want everyone to get one sheet. Watch me as I model how to fold this paper to make it into a tri-fold. First, take the paper and fold it over 1/3 of the page. Then with the remaining part of the paper, fold it behind the two parts. Your paper should be split into three sections: a title page, two middle pages, and a back page. Now you try, and I’ll come around and help you if you need.
3 Now that everyone has made their tri-fold, let’s talk about why we made our sheets of paper like this. We will be using this paper as a study card to help us make a summary. First we need to know the steps to make a summary:
1 The 1st step in summarization is: picking out the most important details and underlining or highlighting them.
2 The 2nd step is finding the repeated details that are unimportant and crossing them out.
3 The 3rd and final step is organizing the information you found in step one.
Now, I want you to write these steps on the front page of your trifold. (Ask students to recall the steps to you as you have them write the steps out.) I want you to turn to the back last page of your trifold and write down helpful tips to remember about summarizing. Here’s a tip: summaries should always be shorter in length than the information you are summarizing.
1. To continue our learning on animals, I’m going to pass out an article now, called “Giraffe.” By National Geographic. Everyone should get a copy. This article is about the interesting facts of giraffes, their size and behavior and height and size. “How do you think a giraffe will be different than all the other mammals?” Now, as we read let’s pick out any information that is not important. For example, it is not important to know “Bulls sometimes battle one another by butting their long necks and heads. Such contests aren't usually dangerous and end when one animal submits and walks away”. Let’s cross that out. We also need to identify and locate important pieces of information. When it says, “A giraffe's legs alone are taller than many humans—about 6 feet . These long legs allow giraffes to run as fast as 35 miles an hour over short distances and cruise comfortably at 10 miles an hour over longer distances”. Let’s write this information on the left middle page of our trifold. The last thing we need to do is write our topic sentence. We know that the article is about Giraffes, so our topic sentence should be Interesting facts on Giraffes. Once we have written that, we can continue to write our summary using the rest of the information we found and putting it into our own words. The two middle page will be for writing the main ideas on the left side, and supporting details on the right side. Ask the students, “What is it about?” and “What is the main point?”
2. Now we are going to practice our summarizing skills when reading on our own. Before we practice our summarization, let’s look at a few vocabulary words. Does anyone know what the word mammal means? Mammals are warm-blooded animals with hair that feed their young with milk. Some examples of mammals are humans, dogs, and lions. Whales and dolphins are mammals too, even though they don’t live on land. Another word we need to know is stature. Stature means a “persons natural height”. When referring to someones height you can use the word stature. Now we are going to read about a giraffes stature. We get to get a full understanding of the importance of a giraffes stature. After each paragraph, I want you to stop and use your trifold to organize the information. Remember to highlight important information, cross-out unimportant information, cross-out repeated information, and write a topic sentence.
3. Everyone’s tri-folds are looking great so far! Once you’ve read the whole article and gotten the main ideas and supporting details highlighted, I want you to write down a one-paragraph brief summary on the article. At the bottom of your article, write five new vocabulary words you learned from the article and what they mean.
Assessment:
For assessment I will review each student's topic sentences as well as look over each article for proper markings. Students will be assessed on how well they did on their summaries. I will use this scoring rubric to grade their summaries for the correct information:
In his/her summary, did the student...
• Delete significant information? YES / NO
• Write a topic sentence? YES / NO
• Write 3-5 good, concise sentences? YES / NO
• Select key information from the article? YES / NO
• Choose the correct main topic for this article? YES / NO
• List 5 new vocabulary words/definitions at the end? YES / NO
After this, I will also ask each student a series of comprehension questions as a reading comprehension check for the end of the lesson. The questions will include:
• How tall is the average giraffe?
• What is the importance of a giraffes’ height?
• What enables giraffes to run so quickly?
References:
“Giraffe” National Geographic
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/g/giraffe/
“10 Giraffe facts!” National Geographic kids.
https://www.natgeokids.com/za/discover/animals/general-animals/ten-giraffe-facts/
Swimming into Summarization by Anna Laws
