Reading to Learn Design

Soaring into Summarization

Reading to Learn Lesson Design

By: Hannah Helton

Rationale: The goal of this lesson is to help children comprehend texts and learn from what they are reading. Being able to understand text is the ultimate goal of reading. This lesson will teach reading comprehension by allowing students to retain information that they are reading by highlighting, asking questions, and giving summaries. Throughout this lesson, we will use research from educational experiences to teach how to better comprehend. Students should be able to understand text as well as its meaning, in light of its context. Students will learn about summaries and how to use them. The point of summarization is to choose the main ideas of the story and present them in a manner that magnifies the whole text.

Materials:

Paper for writing
Pencil to write their summaries
Highlighter for each student to highlight important ideas from articles
Bookmark that has summarization rules
Articles to read for each student
Quiz for each student
Rubrics for summary guidelines

Procedures:

Say: Good morning class! Today we are going to learn how to summarize. Summarizing means picking out the most important parts and information of a book, article, or story and explaining it to someone. Of course, we can’t share every single detail of a story with someone, so we have to choose the pieces of information that are very important to the story. Today, we are going to practice summarizing articles. Everyone will read two different articles and then you will each write a sentence, explaining what that article is about.
Say: Before we start reading, I am going to pass around a bookmark that shares the four secrets to summarization on it. Let’s read the four secrets together. 1)Delete unimportant information, 2) highlight important information, 3) ignore small details, 4) superordinate and form a topic sentence. Make sure you keep track of your bookmark because these secrets are key to good summarization.
Say: The article that we are going to read today is about Bald Eagles. Pass out article to every student. Has anyone ever seen a bald eagle? Wait for responses. Well today we are going to learn all about them! As you are reading, remember to pay attention to the secrets to summarization on your bookmarks! After you finish reading the whole article, I want you to write a one or two sentence summary of this article. Should our summary be longer than the article itself? Wait for responses.No, it shouldn’t.
When students finish reading and writing their summaries say: Class, I am going to read a paragraph of article out loud and then we are going to try to figure out the most important part of the paragraph and create a few summary sentences, based off what you all think.
Say- Now that we have read one paragraph of this article, I want y'all to finish the article on your own. We will then talk about the most important parts of this article. Once we have discussed some important parts of this article, we will use our class summaries to create a topic sentence. We need to ask ourselves a few questions like: What is this article about? What is the main idea of this article? What happens in this article? What does the author of this article want me to know about bald eagles?
After we have class discussion about the article and construct a class summary say: Since all of you did such a great job reading that article and generating a summary, we are going to read another article about a different kind of bird. This bird is different than a bald eagle because it lives in places where it snows and they waddle on their feet. Can anyone guess which bird I am talking about? Wait for responses. Yes a penguin, you are right!
Say: Now what do we do if there is a word that we do not understand in the text? For example, in the penguin article, I could may not understand the word, “regurgitate”. I would ask myself: What do I think this word means? Does it have something to do with a penguins food? What does his word have to do with penguins? I would then look up the word in the dictionary. This would help me figure out that the word means to bring swallowed food, up again to the mouth. This means that Penguins feed their children by throwing up their food. Now I would need to use this word in a sentence. Here is my sentence I want each of you to complete: In order to feed their baby, the mother penguin had to _______________ (regurgitate her food). Now I want each of you to write a sentence using this word correctly. I will walk around the room and check their sentences to see if they used the word correctly. Can anyone give me an example? Great! It is important to recognize that this word is a crucial piece of the article and that it would not make as much sense without it.
I am going to pass out an article to everyone and I want everyone to read it and highlight important information with your highlighter. After you have read the article, try to come up with a topic sentence.
I will walk around the room and see how everyone is doing. Say- Everyone’s writing is looking great! Let’s remind ourselves to pick out the important details to back up our main idea while we read. Once this is done, everyone should have the information to write a summary.
Say: When everyone has completed this task, please bring me your two summaries. I will then go to check over their summaries and review each students’ work.

Checklist:

Name: ____________

Identified what the article was about- YES/NO
Identified the point the author was trying to make- YES/NO
Delete insignificant information- YES/NO

9. After the assessment regarding their summaries, I will then ask students to answer a few questions about the text. This will allow me to check their comprehension and understanding of the text.

Comprehension questions for “Emperor Penguin”

In your own words, what happens to the penguins’ egg once it is laid?
Where do most penguins live?
What are two interesting facts about penguins?
What are some ways that penguins have to adapt to their environment?
Even though penguins are considered birds, what sets them apart from other birds?

References:

- Olivia Bolton, Leap Into Summarization- https://ojb0003.wixsite.com/mysite-2/reading-to-learn

- Annagail Holton, Take a Safari Into Learning- https://ach0072.wixsite.com/mysite/reading-to-learn

- Bald Eagle Article: https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/animals/birds/bald-eagle/

- Penguin Article: https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/animals/birds/emperor-penguin/