Miss Davis's Reading Lessons
Rationale: The main goal for readers is to comprehend the information they are reading. A strategy that will help readers with comprehension is summarizing. Summarizing is a strategy readers can use when identifying and recalling the main ideas in a text. This lesson provides students with the steps of summarization and will allow students to put their knowledge of summarization into practice. This lesson teaches readers to delete trivial and redundant information and focus on the important parts of a text. Students will practice their skills on short passages while using the summarization checklist.
Materials: Class set of the article "Desert Biome", Poster with the rules of summarization written on it, Assessment chart for each student (for teacher use), Colored marker for each student, Lined paper for each student, Projector
Procedures: 1. Say: "Who has ever read an article or a book, and told a friend about what you read? Do you read them the whole book, or do you just tell them the important parts of what you read? You only tell them important parts of the story! This is called giving your friend a summary of the book or article. Summarization is a helpful strategy good readers use to help comprehend or understand what you are reading. If you can summarize a book or article, it is a good sign that you are able to understand what you’ve read! When giving a summary to someone else, the get the sense that you read the story, understand the text, and have pulled out the main parts of that story."
2. Next, review with students about crosschecking and rereading to help understand a statement that they are having problems with. “Before we talk about summarizing, let’s go over what to do if we come across a word that we do not understand.” Show students the poster with the sentence, ‘I have a hard test tomorrow’. Students, if I read this sentence, ‘I have a had test tomorrow’, I would think that sounds weird. Let me read the sentence again slowly. ‘I havvveee a hadddddd tesssstttt tooomorrroww. had? Oh, hard, I have a hard test tomorrow! As you can see, cross-checking helps us when we do not understand words.”
3. “Now, we will discuss the rules of summarization. Let’s look at these rules. Everybody take out a marker and a sheet of paper. Fold your piece of paper and fold in it into four. Then staple the pieces to make a booklet. Okay, now let's look at our "Rules of Summarizing" poster. Rule number 1: Get rid of unimportant and repeated information. This rule tells us to take out anything that is not important to the passage we are reading and anything that is mentioned more than once. This will help you to understand the message the author is trying to tell you. Now let's go to the second rule. Rule number 2: Organize items and events together and find important the important information. Everybody write this rule on the second page. This rule simply means to get all of our information together and organize it. You should underline or highlight the important information or sentence so that you can go back and remember that it must be important. Rule number 3: Select a topic. This means that we should create a topic that is only one or two words that tells exactly what we will be talking about. Everybody write this rule on the third page. Rule number 4: Write a topic sentence that covers everything you find important about what you read. This can be very brief, but it needs to cover what you find to be very important out of everything you read. A topic sentence combines all of the important information in a short, condensed way so that you are able to summarize and comprehend the paragraph you read.
4. Say: "Now we are going to practice summarizing with an article called “Desert Biome”. Have you ever wanted to know more about the deserts that are across our world? In this article, we can learn so many interesting facts and information on deserts and which ones are close to us! Let’s keep reading to find out more! Let's look at the first paragraph of the article together: Desert biomes cover about one fifth of the Earth's surface and are defined to occur where rainfall is less than 50 centimeters (cm) per year. Although most deserts, such as the Sahara of North Africa and the deserts of the southwestern U.S., Mexico, and Australia, occur at low latitudes, another kind of desert, cold deserts, occur in the basin and range area of Utah and Nevada and in parts of western Asia. Most deserts have a considerable amount of specialized vegetation, as well as specialized vertebrate and invertebrate animals. Soils often have abundant nutrients because they need only water to become very productive and have little or no organic matter. Disturbances are common in the form of occasional fires or cold weather, and sudden, infrequent, but intense rains that cause flooding. Let's look at one word that stands out to me: vertebrate. Let me use it in a sentence to see if you can use context clues to figure out what it means. The dog is a vertebrate because of his body structure on his back. What does it mean to be a vertebrate? I want you to turn and talk to the person next to you and come up with a sentence using the word vertebrate." (Wait time) "Can anyone tell me what the word vertebrate means? Who can tell me the sentence you and your partner came up with?" Call on students. "Awesome! So we figured out that animals that are vertebrates are animals with backbones."
5. Say: “Ok, now I want everyone to watch me as I use my rules to summarize this paragraph. (Pull out a pre-made booklet with 4 pages). Let's look at the first sentence: “Desert biomes cover about one fifth of the Earth's surface and are defined to occur where rainfall is less than 50 centimeters (cm) per year.” Do we think it is important that we know this information? I would say yes. I think this is an important fact so I am going to write this on my second page in my booklet. Let’s look at the second sentence and third sentences. “Although most deserts, such as the Sahara of North Africa and the deserts of the southwestern U.S., Mexico, and Australia, occur at low latitudes, another kind of desert, cold deserts, occur in the basin and range area of Utah and Nevada and in parts of western Asia. Most deserts have a considerable amount of specialized vegetation, as well as specialized vertebrate and invertebrate animals.” I do not think sentence number two is very important because they talk more specifically later in the article. They are just repeating names that they talk about later and it takes away from the other facts being told. Sentence three, however, tells us an important fact about the overall animals that live in the desert. I am going to write sentence number two under the first page and three on my second page of my booklet. I am going to mark an X over the rest of the information and write it in my first column because I don’t think it is important.”
6. Say: “Now that we have finished the first paragraph let's try and see if we can come up with a topic sentence. Remember, a topic sentence is one sentence that explains what the whole paragraph is talking about. I am going to look at the parts I have on my second page for the important information I wrote down. Look at your second page to see what important information that we wrote down. I have “Desert biomes cover about one fifth of the Earth's surface and are defined to occur where rainfall is less than 50 centimeters (cm) per year. Most deserts have a considerable amount of specialized vegetation, as well as specialized vertebrate and invertebrate animals.” I would make this a topic sentence by saying: Desert biomes are dry areas that cover one fifth of the Earth’s surface. Deserts contain both vertebrate and invertebrate animals and have an amount of vegetation to go along with these animals”. Now I have all my important information and the summary of the paragraph I just read. Does anybody have any questions?”
7. Say: “Now, I am going to let you summarize each of the remaining paragraphs. Remember to use your booklet with the columns to help you break up the information. You can also look at our summarizing poster as well if you need help! Come up with one topic sentence for each paragraph. When you are finished, I want you to staple the article to the back of your book, and turn it in to me.”
8. Assessment: I will review each student's booklets to determine if they could successfully summarize the different paragraphs. I will use the assessment checklist to record each child's grade. Topic sentences may vary slightly, but I will be looking to see if they child included the important information in each.
Comprehension Questions:
1. What are the four major North American deserts that are hot and dry?
2. What are the main plants found in these deserts?
3. What are the characteristics of a coastal desert?
Assessment:
Student Name: ___________________________
1. Did the student fill out the chart on his/her paper?
2. Did the students come up with topic sentences for the remaining paragraphs?
3. Did the student successfully delete unimportant/redundant information?
4. Did the student successfully identify important parts?
5. Did the student use the important information to come up with topic sentence?
References
Emily Wilcox, Summarizing Shore is Fun:
“Desert Biome”, The Encyclopedia of Earth: