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Reading to Learn: Swimming into Summarization

Mary Margaret Grammas

Rationale:

The goal for readers is that they will learn by comprehending what they have read. After students begin reading correctly and fluently, they can move onto the next level. Comprehensive reading is how the student will be able to understand what the text is saying. Students need to understand how to read to learn. The biggest part of reading to learn is summarization. Summarizing teaches students to pick the most important information and get rid extraneous details. This lesson will teach reading comprehension by showing students how to summarize and determine important events in a text. Comprehension will be shown by students answering questions about the articles once they have been read.

Materials:

· Paper/pencil, highlighters

· Bookmark with summarization rules

1.) Delete or mark out information that isn’t important

2.) Highlight the import information

3.) Ignore the small details

4.) Find an umbrella term for events that happen in the text

5.) Form a topic sentence from the reading

· Summarization checklist

· Articles: Swimming and Funky looking Fish

· Summarization rubric

Procedures:

1. Say: Today we are going to learn to summarize an article we read! We can remember what we read by summarizing. This means you will pick out the most significant details from the article. Let’s practice this skill by reading two articles! We will pick out the main idea and what information supports that idea by eliminating details we don’t need.

2. Say: The rules of summarizing are on these special bookmarks (pass out bookmarks). You will refer to these rules while you are reading, but I will also write them on the board for you to see!

3. Say: After you read the first article, I want you to remove the repeated information and highlight only what’s important. Then write down the main idea.

4. Say: Remember the summary should be shorter than the article itself! Now I am going to give everyone an article about swimming! (pass out copies and give book talk) Who in here loves to swim? Well we are going to learn all about the history of swimming and how the techniques began. Don’t forget we are swimming into summarization, so make sure you are keeping track of your bookmark rules to summarize the article in the end.

5. (when students finish reading) Say: Now let’s go through and highlight what we think is the most important facts in this article! (call on different students to see what they highlighted) Now let’s create our topic sentence by answering the questions: what is it about? What is the main point? (students respond) Okay, you should now be able to begin writing your summaries using that information. (walk around the room to help)

6. Say: Since we did so good with the first article, we are now ready for another one! (pass out Funky Looking Fish article and do book talk) While swimming in the lake or ocean, we sometimes see some funny creatures! Have you ever wondered how they got there and what they are? Let’s read and then summarize this article to find out all about these funky fish! When you read, don’t forget to highlight the important facts. Once you finish write your topic sentence that tells the main idea.

7. (walk around to check everyone’s sentences) Let’s continue to pick out the important details to back up our main idea. Once we have done that, everyone should have a completed summary paragraph!

8. Now that we have summarized, let’s pick out a word we may have struggled with. The word is “oceanography”. This word means the physical and biological study of the sea. (show picture of scientists studying the ocean) Who can give me a sentence using this word? (wait for responses) This word must be important to our story! Let’s try to understand the passage when we take out the word (read the paragraph). See, it doesn’t make much sense.

9. Say: When everyone is done, they should bring me the summaries from both articles!

Assessment:

In the student’s summary did they…

· Delete unimportant information? YES/NO

· Create a topic sentence? YES/NO

· Create 3-5 good, clear sentences? YES/NO

· Choose key points? YES/NO

· Choose the correct main idea? YES/NO

After the assessment, I will ask each student questions as a reading comprehension check for the end of the lesson.

Comprehension Questions for “Funky-Looking Fish”

1. What is a Macropinna?

2. How can it stay motionless?