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Swimming into Summarization

Reading to Learn Design

Rationale:

The goal of reading is for students to comprehend what they read. In order to become better readers, we must truly understand what we are reading. One way to for beginning readers to improve comprehension is to learn how to summarize. To summarize is to take all the important details and main ideas out of a text and combine them in a way that explains the story. Basically, summarization is where you find an umbrella term for the events that happen in the text. This lesson helps students learn how to find main ideas and key details in a text by having the teacher model summarization and then by summarizing themselves. The teacher will show the strategy of summarizing by explicitly modeling how to pick out important details and eliminate unimportant ones, and then guide students through summarizing their own passages. The students will be assessed on their summarization skills through comprehension questions.

Materials:

Rules written on the white board:

take out minor details (delete trivia and redundancies)
find an umbrella term for the events that happen in the text (superordinate items and events)
write a sentence that tells what the text is about (find or compose a sentence that covers everything the writer id saying about the topic)

Paper for each student
Pencil for each student
Highlighter for each student
Class copies of seahorse national geographic article
Bookmark that has summarization rules

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 did you tell them only the important parts of the book? If so, that is called summarization.”

Say: “Now that you all are becoming fluent readers, we need to learn a new skill to help with reading comprehension. The strategy we are going to be working on is summarization. Summarization, like mentioned before, is understanding the main ideas in a text. It helps us 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: “In order to successfully summarize, we must understand these three rules. (Point to rules written on the white board and have students copy down). Rule one, mark out any unnecessary or repeated information. Can anyone tell me how they know what unnecessary information would be? Right! It is information that doesn’t pertain to the main idea. Rule two, find an umbrella term for the events that happen in the text. The last rule is to form a sentence to represent the main idea from what you highlighted.”

Say: “Now that we know our key strategies for helping us summarize, we can begin to look at an article to practice summarizing. I am going to show you how I would do these steps of summarization with a short article about seahorses that we are reading today!” (Book talk: How many of you have ever been to an aquarium and seen a seahorse? Seahorses use their tales to grasp onto objects in many different situations. Why do you think their curled tail is a good thing? Did you know that they are the size of a jelly bean when they are born? We are going to read just how exciting these amazing creatures are).

Say: “In order to summarize and understand what we are reading, it is important to make sure we know what all the words in the passage mean. 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 word please make sure you right the word, its definition, and the sentence used. [for each word explain the word in simple language, model how to use the word” (what doesn’t it mean?), provide sample questions using the word, and scaffold by making a sentence using the word for students to complete.] For example, “let’s look at the first vocabulary word, species. A species is a distinct group of animals or plants that have common characteristics and can breed with each other. The word is used in the passage, “There are least 25 species of seahorses.” Which of these is an example of species: “The rainforest has many different plant species.” OR “I saw different species of cars." Right! “The rainforest has many different plant species” is correct because a species is a plant or animal with common characteristics. Now that we know what species means, can you see how it fits into the sentence? What other species can you think of?” (repeat modeling process for the remaining vocabulary words). Vocabulary words: species, dorsal, volume

Say: “As I pass out to you the articles we are going to summarize today, take another look out our summarization rules that are on the board and make sure they are copied down correctly.” Once everything is passed out and the students have everything copied down, begin the lesson.

Say: “Who can tell me, based off the rules, what they think we should do first if we want to summarize this article? Right! Highlight the most important information. Let’s look at the first paragraph and see if we can start the process of summarization. We first highlight all important sentences. Once we highlight the important sentences, we can go back and mark the ones that were not as important.” (Explain why you highlighted and marked out certain sentences when modeling the paragraph below).

Seahorses are tiny fishes that are named for the shape of their head, which looks like the head of a tiny horse. There are at least 25 species of seahorses. You’ll find them in the world’s tropical and temperate coastal waters, swimming upright among seaweed and other plants. Seahorses use their dorsal fins (back fins) to propel slowly forward. To move up and down, seahorses adjust the volume of air in their swim bladders, which is an air pocket inside their bodies.

Say: “Now all of your articles should look like mine. Now that we have everything highlighted and crossed out, we are going to form a topic sentence based off our highlighted information.” (Write sentence on board for students to refer to) “Seahorses are found in tropical and temperate coastal waters and use their dorsal fins and swim bladders to help them propel and move up and down in the ocean.”

Say: “We are going to continue this process for 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 and cross out anything that is not as important. 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!

As students finish, have them turn in their article and summary for a grade. Tell them to pick up a comprehension question exit slip that they will fill out as well. The exit slip will consist of the following questions: 1. How does a seahorse use its dorsal fins? 2. How many different species of seahorses are there? 3. Where are seahorses found? 4. Why must baby seahorses hide as soon as they are born? 5. What do you think the author intended the purpose of the article to be? Have students turn in their annotated article and a summary and grade as form of assessment. The rubric used:

Summary rubric:

_____ Student underlined/highlighted important ideas (Yes or No)

_____ Student crossed out unimportant detail (Yes or No)

_____ Summary used 1+ complete sentences in their summary (Yes or No)

_____ Student identified topics accurately in summary (Yes or No)

_____ Student included key ideas in summary (Yes or No)

Comprehension Question Exit Slip:

How does a seahorse use its dorsal fin?
How many different species of seahorses are there?
Where are seahorses found?
Why must baby seahorses hide as they are born?
What do you think the author intended the purpose of the article to be?

References

National Geographic Article

https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/animals/seahorse/#sea-horse-closeup-face.jpg

Ashley Kirkland, “Swimming into Summarization”

https://abk0020.wixsite.com/reading/reading-to-learn

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