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Swimming the Sea with Summarization

Reading to Learn

Emmy Wilson

Rationale: 

Once students have learned how to read fluently they can begin to work on reading comprehension. Comprehension is the final step of learning and one of the most important. Being able to comprehend helps students because they can understand what they are reading instead of having to decode the words. This lesson plan is going to teach the students how to focus on the main points of the text. Students will be able to take out the unimportant, emphasize on the important and summarize the information from there. I will start by giving an example of how the students need to summarize their readings. 

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Materials:

  • Paper

  • Pencils

  • Sheet of blank paper for summarizing rules

  • Reading binder

  • Sheet of lined paper for summarizing article

  • Highlighters

  • Sharpie

  • Summarization checklist (1 per student for teacher to use)

  • Comprehension questions for assessment

  • “Orcas” by National Geographic for Kids

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Procedures:

SAY: Raise your hand if you have ever read a book that you thought was so interesting that you wanted to tell someone about it. When you told them, what part of the book did you tell them about? Correct! The most important parts. This is called summarization.

 

SAY: Today we will be learning a new reading strategy. Because we are all fluent readers we are going to be working with a new skill that can help us gain reading comprehension. The strategy we are going to be working on is summarization. Summarization helps us take one big article and look at the important facts, rather than the whole text. We are going to look at an article so that we understand the main points of the article. As we summarize we are going to be focusing on the main idea, looking at facts that support this idea, and what information we can take out.

 

SAY: Before we begin we need to learn some rules for summarization. We are going to use our piece of white paper to write these rules down so everyone remembers them! As I write each rule on the board I want you to copy it on your paper. Once you have written all these rules down you can place them in the front of your reading binder so they will be easy to find when you have to refer back to them during your article readings.

[write on board:

  1. Cross out any unimportant or repeated information that is not essential to the message of the text.

  2. Find and highlight the important information that is essential to the text.

  3. Form a topic sentence from the important information you highlighted. 

 

SAY: Our first step in summarizing is deleting trivia, which is information that is not important to the main idea of the article. As we read the articles you can cross out small facts that might not be important. Once we have deleted the unimportant information I want you to highlight the information that is important for our understanding of the main point. Lastly, we will make a thesis/topic sentence that states the main point of the text.

 

SAY: The main idea of the article will be supported by all the details in the article. Now that we know our key strategies for helping us summarize we can begin to look at an article to practice summarizing. In a few minutes, I am going to show you how I would do these steps of summary with a paragraph about Orcas, which is the article we will be reading today. [booktalk: How many of you have ever heard about killer whales?! Killer whales are also known as Orcas. Orcas are very big and sometimes scary! Do you know how much orcas eat in on day? Do you know how orcas get all of their food? Orcas are so heavy they weigh 24x more than a piano! Let’s read the article to find out more interesting facts about orcas!]

 

SAY: another important strategy in reading comprehension is understanding important vocabulary in the passage. We are going to go over a few words together that you will see in the article that we are going to read today. [for each for explain the word in simple language, model how to use the word (what does it mean? What doesn’t it mean?), provide sample questions using the word, and scaffold by making a sentence using the word for students to complete.]

  • Words: pods, compact, prey, superbly

  • EXAMPLE: SAY: one of the words in our passage is pods; let’s look at what the means.

    • Pods means a small herd of marine animals.

    • The whales swam together in a pod like form. The whales would not be swimming in a pod if there was only one whale swimming.

    • Which of these is an example of pods: A group of dogs walking together or a group of whales swimming together.

    • Those whales are swimming in a pod because…

 

[Hang poster with five paragraphs on it besides the poster with the summarization rules. Teacher needs thick sharpie and highlighter. Pass out the Orca article to each student along with highlighter and pencil.]

 

SAY: As we begin, let’s delete some information that is not important. When you come across something that you don’t think we need, cross it out. When you find information that is important for our understanding of the main idea, highlight it! After we read each paragraph, we are going to write a summary sentence that states the main idea of the paragraph. You can use the following questions to guide your summaries: what is the paragraph talking about? What is the main point? After the students finish writing their sentences, we will go over what a good summary is and share some with the class.

 

SAY: The first step in our summarization is to look for the main idea in the paragraphs. This can usually be found by looking at the title of the article, or the topic sentences in each paragraph. What do you think this article is about? Correct, Orcas! The information in this article helps us learn more about orcas, but that is not necessarily the most important thing for us to understand. Let’s look at the second paragraph together and try to come up with a summarization sentence and a topic sentence. My summarization sentence and topic sentence would look something like this based off of the second paragraph:

 

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SAY: Now, I am going to form a topic sentence using my highlighted information: “Orcas eat up to 500 pounds of food daily using hunting techniques to eat animals such as fish or walruses.”

 

SAY: We are going to continue to point out important facts in each paragraph of this article. Now that we have practiced this together I want you to continue to work individually on this task. I want you to pick out some important facts and highlight them. Don’t forget to be crossing out unimportant details when doing so! Once you are done and have found the most important facts in each paragraph, you can start to put all the sentences together to make your own one, big paragraph. This paragraph is your summary!

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Assessment:

Students will be assessed at the end of the lesson based on their abilities to summarize the text for the correct information along with the following reading comprehension questions:

 

Summary Rubric:

_____ Student underlined important ideas

_____ Student did not underline trivia

_____ Summary used 1+ complete sentences in their summary

_____ Student identified topics accurately in summary

_____ Student included key ideas in summary

_____ Student omitted trivia in summary

 

Comprehension Questions:

  1. Is an Orca more likely to eat a land animal or a sea animal? Why? [sea! Orcas are from the ocean, and if they see an animal such as a seal on land or ice, they have a bumping technique they use to watch them.]

  2. Why is an Orcas coloring a helpful hunting technique? [The orcas while underside blends in with the light streaming down from the surface making them hard to spot from below. They have dark backs so looking down on them they blend in with the water.]

  3. How do Orcas eat their food? [They do not chew their food. They rip or tear their prey apart, or in some cases they swallow it whole!]

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