Reading to Learn

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Making Waves in Summarization

Reading to Learn Design

By: Rachel Paradise

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Rationale:

Summarization can be helpful for students to fully understand what they are reading by focusing on the most important parts of the text.  This can help students become expert readers and it is a vital tool that helps students emphasize on important details and main ideas in order to explain what the text was portraying. Research indicates that practice with finding specific details and summarizing the text can help with reading comprehension. This lesson will help guide students into finding these key details and main ideas. The instructor will model summarization and then students will show their understanding through independent practice. Once the instructor has guided how to summarize the students text the students will be tested on their skills through comprehension questions provided by the instructor. 

 

Materials:

• Article about Oceans for each student (“Ocean” https://kids.britannica.com/kids/article/ocean/346185)

• Pencils, Highlighters and Paper for each student

• Assessment checklist

• Comprehension questions

 

Procedures:

1. Say: Today we are going to learn how to summarize! This means that we are going to learn how to find the key ideas of what we read. This is important to learn how to do because it helps us make sure we understand what the text is trying to tell us. 

2. Say: When we summarize, we first need to cross out any unimportant information that is not repeated in the text. Then, we will highlight important information that we think is key information in the text. Sometimes this can be a little tricky to spot but a helpful hint is to look at facts that relate to the topic or title of the text! Finally, to make sure we understand the main idea of the text, we will create a topic sentence. Does anyone know what a topic sentence is? It is a sentence that generalizes the important information we have collected from the text and it explains the main idea of the text.  

3. Say: Now I am going to explain how to follow these steps with the text: “Ocean” in the passage “Ocean Water”. (Pass out articles)

For example:  “Winds and other forces cause ocean water to be constantly in motion. Large amounts of ocean water move around Earth in patterns called currents. Ocean currents may be warm or cold. Warm currents tend to bring warm weather and rain to nearby land. Cold currents tend to cause a dry climate. The Gulf Stream is a warm current that runs north along the eastern coast of the United States. Winds also cause ocean water to move in waves. Steady, powerful winds cause big waves. Gentle breezes create ripples. Large swells in ocean water usually come from stormy weather.” (Britannica - Kids)

So, we know that we first off need to cross out unimportant information. We know that this article is about the ocean because of it’s title. In this portion of the article, we are reading about winds and currents. Some unimportant information may be that “The Gulf Stream is a warm current that runs north along the eastern coast of the United States” because it is a little too specific if we are just trying to understand a general overview of oceans. Next, we need to find and highlight important information. So what important facts do we see about currents and waves? Well we know that the passage goes into depth about what cold currents and warm currents do. So, we should highlight: “Warm currents tend to bring warm weather and rain to nearby land. Cold currents tend to cause a dry climate.”  We should also highlight: “Winds and other forces cause ocean water to be constantly in motion. Large amounts of ocean water move around Earth in patterns called currents.” because it explains the main ideas of winds and currents in our oceans. Lastly, we need to create a topic sentence from our highlighted information. My topic sentence could be something like this: “Oceans have currents that move the water in motions. Warm Currents bring warm weather and rain to land while cold currents bring dry climate.”

4. Say: Now that we have an idea of how to summarize a text, let’s move on to a different portion of the text, called “Ocean Life”. Let’s review a few of the words that are in the text, such as: seaweed, trenches, anemones, etc. 

5. When we review the vocabulary make sure to provide a definition that is easy to understand, use each word in a sentence, then ask questions for each word and model for students how to create a sentence using the words. For example, Say:  “Seaweed is a type of plant in the seed that provides oxygen to other sea animals just like trees do for us on land! An example of a sentence would be, “The fish swims through the leafy seaweed”. So, if we were in the ocean, what kinds of things get oxygen from seaweed? (allow students to name different types of sea animals). Now use your favorite sea animal to make a sentence. You could say something like: “The sea turtle can breath from the seaweed.”

6. Now allow students to practice summarizing “Ocean Life: Oceans”. Say: We are going to practice summarizing with the Ocean Life section. This article describes the different types of animals and plants in the ocean all the way from animals that are so small you cannot see to giant whales that are bigger than this room! While you are reading the article remember to highlight the important information, and cross out the unimportant information. After you are finished reading, write a topic sentence about what the article section was about, using your highlighted information! 

 

Assessment: When students are finished collect their articles and papers including the topic sentence and comprehension questions and staple them together. Grade using this checklist:

 

___ Marked out unimportant or repeated information? Y/N

___ Highlighted important information? Y/N

___ Reduced text to a few words or phrases? Y/N

___ Wrote a simple topic sentence summarizing the article? Y/N

___ Used critical thinking and accurate resources to answer comprehension questions from the article? Y/N

 

Comprehension questions:

What type of plants live in the ocean?

What types of animals live in the ocean?

What is the largest animal in the ocean?

Why might something living in the ocean want to be close to the water’s surface?

Where does the largest animal on earth live?

 

References:

Oceans - https://kids.britannica.com/kids/article/ocean/346185

Sloth’s Surfing Through Summarization (Maddie Bradford) - https://sites.google.com/view/missmaddieslessondesigns/reading-to-learn-design