Soaring Towards Summarization
A Reading to Learn Lesson Design
Rationale: Once children have learned to read accurately and fluently, they must move on to the next step in reading. The ultimate goal of reading is comprehension, and the next step in reading is reading to learn. This lesson focuses on summarizing, a strategy to help students begin to read to learn. This lesson will help students learn to summarize by teaching them to delete trivial and redundant information and focus on the important parts of a text.
Materials: rocketship bookmarks, markers, “Mercury” by Cynthia Sherwood, overhead projector, reading comprehension question sheets
Yes or No:
Did the student...
Get rid of unimportant information?
Get rid of repeated information?
Underline important information?
Write an organized topic sentence using only the important information?
Procedure:
1. Say: Today we’re going to talk about a strategy to help us comprehend what we’re reading. Who remembers what it means to comprehend? That’s right! It means to understand the message of what you’re reading. I hope that by the end of this lesson you will all be able to summarize texts very easily to gain comprehension. Summarizing a text means to pick out the most important information of a text and then make it into a short paragraph or essay. It is so important that you learn how to summarize because we use summaries every day! When I read a good book and I want to share it with you, I have to think very carefully about what happened in the book and then give you a summary about what happened.
2. Say: Before we learn more about how to summarize, let’s review what we’ve been talking about lately. Who can tell me what we’ve been talking about in science? That’s right! We have been talking about outer space. Now let’s review some of the vocabulary we’ve talked about recently. Yesterday we said that an atmosphere is the gas that surrounds a planet. You could say, “The atmosphere that surrounds the Earth is made up of the air we breathe.” Which of these could have an atmosphere? Jupiter, our school, or your house? That’s right! Jupiter has an atmosphere because it is a planet. Yesterday we also talked about telescopes. We said that a telescope is an instrument that makes far away objects look bigger. You could say, “We saw a shooting star through the telescope.”
3. Say: Now that we’ve reviewed our vocabulary, let’s go back to talking about summarizing. You all have spaceship shaped bookmarks and markers on your desks. I want you to copy down each rule as we talk about it, and then at the end of the lesson I’ll give you all a few extra minutes to decorate your bookmark. This will help us remember the rules of summarization! The first rule of summarizing is “delete unimportant or repeated information.” This means that if you see something that’s not really important for the meaning of the text or something that you’ve already marked as important, you may draw a line through it or mentally delete it. The second rule of summarizing is to “find important information.” This means that when you see something that you think is important to know you should underline it or maybe write down a key word or phrase. The third rule of summarizing is to “write a topic sentence.” Write that on your bookmark. This part is a little trickier, and we will practice it together in a moment, but it means that once you’ve picked out the parts of the text that are important (what the paragraph is about and what the point is), you combine them to create a topic sentence. This topic sentence captures all the important parts of a paragraph within a text.
4. Pass out copies of “Mercury” and display a copy on the board using an overhead projector or some type of document camera. Give a booktalk for “Mercury” by saying, “This article is about a planet in our solar system that is very different from earth. Let’s read to find out what life would be like there!”
Say: Now we are going to practice summarizing as a class. Let’s look at the first paragraph of our article:
Mercury is the planet nearest the sun. It’s so close that if you were standing on Mercury, the sun would appear two and a half times bigger than what it looks like from here on Earth.
Say: I want everyone to be following along with me and paying attention to how I follow these rules. Let’s look at the first sentence: Mercury is the planet nearest the sun. This is pretty important to understand the rest of the article so we’ll underline that Let’s keep reading; It’s so close that if you were standing on Mercury, the sun would appear two and a half times bigger than what it looks like from here on Earth. Hmm… What parts of this sentence are important for understanding? I think the part that says, “the sun would appear two and a half times bigger” is important so I’ll underline that, but the part that says “It’s so close that if you were standing on Mercury” is not super important so I’ll cross that out.
So now that we’ve applied rules 1 and 2 of summarizing to this paragraph, I’m going to demonstrate how to use rule 3 and create a topic sentence using the pars I underlined. I’ve got Mercury is the planet nearest the sun and the sun would appear two and a half times bigger so I’ll say, “Mercury is the planet closest to the sun so the sun appears two and a half times bigger than it does from Earth.”
Does everyone understand what I just did? Does anyone have any questions?
5. Say: Now I’m going to let you all practice summarizing with the rest of this article. I want you to go through each paragraph and break it down like we just did. Be sure to follow the rules for summary and then change the order around in your topic sentence if necessary so that it makes sense. I want you to write a topic sentence for each paragraph in the article. When you are finished, staple your article to your paper with the topic sentences and turn it in. Then you may decorate your bookmark.
Assessment:
I will review each student’s topic sentences as well as the markings on their articles. I will use the assessment checklist for each student to know whether they followed the rules and understood how to summarize accordingly. I will assess their summaries for the entire article and give bonus points if they are able to summarize the whole article in one sentence.
I will also ask these questions for a Reading Comprehension check at the end:
Why is Mercury usually hard to see without a telescope?
How is it possible for Mercury to have frozen ice?
References:
Carter, Lauren. Flying Through Summarization.
https://sites.google.com/site/ctrdlaurencarter/reading-to-learn
Deason, Morgan Grace. Soaring Into Summarizing!
http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/reading_genie/awakenings/deasonmrl.htm
“Mercury” by Cynthia Sherwood http://www.superteacherworksheets.com/space/mercury_WMTTN.pdf
