Reading to Learn
Summarization in Outer Space!
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Rationale: Once students have mastered how to read fluently, they will begin reading to learn. Reading to learn involves being able to summarize and comprehend information from the text. To practice this concept, students will use this lesson to pick out key concepts and learn how to summarize readings. Students begin understanding reading comprehension by asking themselves, “what is the text about?” Then students can proceed by pulling out the main points of the text. However, since writers typically have several points in a text, the reader must “superordinate” the points and find umbrella terms that cover all the main points. This lesson will guide students through the breakdown of an article to help students better understand summarization.
Materials: Pencil for each student, paper, “My First Book of Planets” book for each student (linked below), summarization checklist, white board, a highlighter and “Solar System for Kids: The Planets and Their Moons” book for each student (linked below).
Procedures:
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Say: “Today in class we are going to learn why summarizing is important. Summarizing is finding the main ideas of something you read. Sometimes we read long texts and we need to be able to pick out the important parts to understand what you are reading. If you watched a movie or read a book, could you tell me everything that happened? No, that's right but you could tell me some of the key points - that's a summary! To find the most important information, we need to take out unnecessary information from the text. Now, let's practice finding the main idea and removing unimportant information.
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Say: “Let's break down summarizing into three key steps. [Write cancelled, important, and main ideas on a white board or smart board so all the students can see] These are important steps to achieving a good understanding of the text.
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Say: “Starting off there is cancelled. This is when we go through and cross out any part of the text that is not needed. Cancelled information sometimes makes the story better, but it is not needed. So first we will cross out all the text that is not helpful to the plot. “ [Cross out the word cancelled on the board]
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Say: “Next we will look for important details: this is parts of the text that make the story. We need to search the text for the parts that make the story better. Once you find these parts of the story, you can take your highlighter and highlight them.”
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Say: “Last we are going to identify the main idea. This is what the entire story/passage is based on. Find an umbrella term for the events that happen in the text. Once the unnecessary information is marked out and the important details are identified it should be easy to summarize the main idea. The main idea is what the story/text is based on. We can look at our highlighted text to create a summary sentence that wraps up all the information read.”
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Book Talk: Say: “Today we are going to read about our solar system. Can anyone tell me what solar system means? [take answers] Can anyone list objects that are in outer space? [take answers] Now I am going to pass out an article for you to read: it's about our solar system. Before we read, I am going to point out some important vocabulary words. The first is gravity. What are some things we would not be able to do without gravity? We couldn’t run, walk, crawl, or even do any of your favorite activities. For example, “Miss Mills’ favorite thing to do is play basketball, without gravity I wouldn’t be able to. Now finish the sentence: Without gravity I couldn’t... [Passes out article to students]
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[Read the book out loud as the students follow along on their own copy.]
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Say, “Now, I’m going to show you how I would summarize this article. To start, let us pick out what is not important to the summary. The section ‘What kind of galaxies are there?’ is not really important.
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Say: “Now to pick out the most important details. One thing I noticed is the Milky Way is the galaxy we live in and it is a flat disc. So, I am going to make my topic sentence. “We live in the Milky Way which is a flat disc.” [Write the sentence down on the board.]
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Say: “Now that we have our main idea, we need to work out what the author is trying to say about this topic.” [Write down key topics on the board to show them like planets, the sun, the moon, etc. Continue going through steps, thinking aloud so the students understand the process of deciding what is and is not important to the summary.]
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Say: “Now I am going to pass out an article on making cookies so that you all can practice using the three steps of summarizing. Read the article to yourself and do our three steps to make a summary. [They will read the article and write their own summaries to turn in at the end.]
Assessment: Ask them comprehension questions after they have turned in the summaries. Go over their independent summaries of the article using the chart. All or mostly yes’s means that the student has a strong understanding of summarization. Work on any areas that were given a no.
What planet is closest to the sun?
How many planets are there?
What planet is the brightest?
What percent of earth is covered in water?
What is the largest planet in our solar system?
What planet is farthest from the sun?
Materials:
Summarizing is Sweet! by Sarah Elliot https://sae0016.wixsite.com/my-site/reading-to-learn
My First Book of Planets by Jacob Lee
Solar System for Kids: The Planets and Their Moons: Universe for Kids by Baby Professor
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01A2YJ4DW/ref=kinw_myk_ro_title
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