Rationale: The goal of reading is to comprehend the text. Fluent readers can enhance their reading comprehension through various strategies, one of them being summarization. Summarization gives three main steps to follow in order to have a successful summary. First is to delete trivia and redundancies, which will allow students to focus on the important information. Then students can generate superordinate terms of items or events. Finally, students compose topic sentences that includes all that covers the main ideas. The purpose of these steps is to help children understand the text they are independently reading.
Materials:
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Paper
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Pencils
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Set of summarization rules for each student
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Poster of summarization rules
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Summarization checklists
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Article for modeling (“National Geographic: First Thanksgiving”) *see resources*
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Paragraph from Article for each student (“National Geographic: Giant Panda”) *see resources*
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Quiz for each student
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Procedures
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Say: Today we are going to learn about reading comprehension. Who knows what reading comprehension is? (allow them to answer). When we comprehend the text we are reading, we understand what it means. Today we are going to learn how to better understand the text that we read. The skill we are going to work on is summarization. Can anyone tell what it means to summarize? (allow them to answer). When we summarize, we retell what happened in the text. It is shorter than the actual text, but it includes all of the important ideas in the text. Who is ready to start summarizing?
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Say: To help us summarize, we are going to follow 3 main steps. These steps will allow us to determine what information is the most important to retell. (show the poster with the steps). For step 1, we are going to pick out the important details in the story and highlight them and then we are going to cross out the information that is less important or that is repeated in the text. For the second step, we need to superordinate items and events, which means we need to find general words to replace lists. For the third step, we take the important information and form a topic sentence
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Say: I am going to show you how to summarize a paragraph. This paragraph comes from an article in “National Geographic” about the first Thanksgiving.
“One day that fall, four settlers were sent to hunt for food for a harvest celebration. The Wampanoag heard gunshots and alerted their leader, Massasoit, who thought the English might be preparing for war. Massasoit visited the English settlement with 90 of his men to see if the war rumor was true. Soon after their visit, the Native Americans realized that the English were only hunting for the harvest celebration. Massasoit sent some of his own men to hunt deer for the feast and for three days, the English and native men, women, and children ate together. The meal consisted of deer, corn, shellfish, and roasted meat, far from today's traditional Thanksgiving feast.”
Step 1: I need to look for important details. I think some important details are that the gunshots the Wampanoags heard were from the English hunting for the harvest, not from preparation for war. Also, the Natives helped the English hunt. I think it is also important that the three-day celebration feast is called Thanksgiving. (highlight the information).
Now I need to cross out info that is less important. I don’t think it is important to include how many men Massasoit visited with, how many men the English sent hunting, or that the food is different from what we eat. (cross out the information) I am going to cross out some other phrases that I think are not necessary: “…to see if the rumor was true,” “soon after their visit,” “alerted their leader,”
Step 2: Now I am going to replace specific words with more general terms. So instead of deer, corn, shellfish, and roasted meat I can say food. Instead of men, women, and children I can say all the English and Native people or everyone.
Step 3: Now that we have the important information highlighted and the less important information crossed out, we can form a topic sentence. “After realizing that English gunshot sounds were not in preparation for war, the Wampanoag Natives helped the English hunt food for everyone to eat at the three-day harvest celebration feast, known as Thanksgiving. This includes the important information and it covers the main point of the paragraph. Does anyone have a different topic sentence for this paragraph? (allow them to share their sentences and help them determine which ones are the best).
It may take a few tries to get a good topic sentence and that is okay. Today we are going to do some practice so we can get better at summarizing.
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But before I let you practice, lets look at vocab words you will be reading. Does anyone know what the word dense means? Dense means that something is closely compacted which means something is very close together. For example, “The crowd of people was so dense, I could barely move.” There are so many people really close together in the crowd so the crowd is dense. Can you think of an example of something that is dense? (allow a few students to answer & provide feedback). Finish my sentence. I could barely see the ground because it was covered in dense patches of…
(Repeat for words: rare, nutritious, venture, scarce)
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Now we are ready to practice summarizing so we can all be super summarizers. Can anyone tell me what they think a giant panda eats? (allow them to answer). Alright, well you are going to read an article about the giant panda and it’s eating habits. I am going to give each the first of you the article “Giant Panda” to read and summarize each paragraph using our three steps. Once you complete the first two steps and write your topic sentence for the first paragraph, get with the people at your table and share your topic sentences with each other (Walk around during this time to monitor their collaboration progress and assist with forming topic sentences).
Assessment: the students will finish the article and write a topic sentence for each paragraph making one summary. A quiz will be given to asses reading comprehension.
Say: Once you have each shared your first topic sentence with each other, finish reading the rest of the article and write a topic sentence for each paragraph. Then put all of your topic sentences together to create one summary. Make sure your sentences flow just like each paragraph flows together.
I will evaluate based on the following criteria:
__ Collected important information
__ Ignored trivia and examples in summary.
__ Significantly reduced the text from the original
__ Sentences brought ideas together from each paragraph
__ Sentences organized coherently into essay form.
Quiz:
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Where do the giant pandas live?
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What do the giant pandas eat?
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How do the giant pandas stay healthy?
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How do the giant pandas’ teeth help them eat?
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Why are the giant pandas restricted to limited areas?
References:
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Christine Haley, Let’s FIT a Summary Together
http://cmh0049.wixsite.com/christinelessons/reading-to-learn
“First Thanksgiving.” Kids' Games, Animals, Photos, Stories, and More, 22 Oct. 2015, kids.nationalgeographic.com/explore/history/first-thanksgiving/.
“Giant Panda Facts and Pictures.” Facts and Pictures, 17 Feb. 2015, kids.nationalgeographic.com/animals/giant-panda/#giant-panda-tree.jpg.
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