Ms. Armstrong

Rationale: Summarization is an important comprehension strategy for students to be able to understand all of the new information they take in when reading. This lesson will teach students how to summarize what they are reading and ultimately learn how to find meaning of what they have read.

 

Materials

1.Class set of Non-fiction books (such as a science or history book, textbook)

2.Highlighters for each child

3. Marker

4. Paper

5. Pencil

 

Procedure:
1. I will start the lesson by explaining to children what it means to summarize text. "When summarizing a text, you create a shorter version of what you read, so you take out any information that is not important or that is repeated in the text. For example, if I read a passage such as ‘I went to the beach. I made a sandcastle. I used a bucket. The bucket was blue.’ I could summarize the passage by saying ‘I made a sandcastle at the beach using a blue bucket.’ Do you see how I used the important information from the passage and made a shorter sentence as opposed to have many sentences? Today we are going to be summarizing just like I just did."

2. I will have students get out their textbooks and silently read the assigned passage (this will vary depending on which lesson you are on). "I want everyone to read the text silently. After you finish, be thinking about some of the important points in the story and write down some bullet points on a piece of paper."

3. After the children have finished reading the assigned pages and making notes about the main points, I will pass out copies of the text they just read. "We are now going to summarize what we just finished reading. On the copy of the text I just gave you, I want you to highlight all the main ideas or pieces of information you feel are important, you can look at the bullet points you wrote down right after you read for help." After the students do this, we will then discuss each of these facts as a class. "After you highlight the main points, I want you to take your marker and mark through all of the information you don't feel is important. This is the information that the author included in the text to add to the overall text, but does not need to be put in our summary."

4. "Now that we have gone through the text and pick out what was important and what is not, I want you to write the highlighted information. Make sure you leave out all the information you marked out." Have the students develop the summarization like you showed them earlier in the lesson.

5. After all students are finished, have some students to read their summaries to the class. Have the students to listen and see if their summary is similar to the one being read.

 

Assessment: To assess the student’s summarization skills that the students learned about, I will pass out a new passage for the children to read silently and they will then summarize the passage on their own. I will check over them to make sure they included the main ideas of the story and left out information that is irrelevant. This will demonstrate an understanding of summarization.

 

Reference:

• Bruce, Murray. "Looking Ahead: Teaching Vocabulary and Comprehension Strategies." . Ronkonkoma: Linus Publications, 2012. Print.

 

• Dean, Lindsay. “Reading Genie Website.” Summarization Mapping. http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/reading_genie/elucid/deanrl.html

 

• Thrower, Carmen. "Reading Genie Website." Super Summarizers. http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/reading_genie/chall/throwerrl.html

 

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