Reading to Learn Design
Detail your services
Rationale: The ultimate goal of reading is to develop comprehension skills. This lesson is meant to introduce students to a helpful strategy known as summarization. By learning how to summarize, students will be able to mentally delete redundant and trivial information and focus on the most important information. In this lesson, students will use these summarization strategies to read, learn, and understand an article about cheetahs.
Materials:
- Class set of the article “Bull Shark” by Kids National Geographic
- Poster containing summarization rules (delete trivial or unimportant information, find the important information, create a topic sentence if one is not already presented)
- Marker for each student
- Paper for each student
- Whiteboard
- Assessment chart for each student (filled out by teacher)
Procedures:
1. Say: “Raise your hand if you have ever read an article or a book and told a friend about the reading? Do you read them the whole book, or do you just tell them the important parts of what you read? (Call on student). Yes! You only tell them important parts of the story! This is called a summary of the book or article. Summarization is a very helpful strategy good readers use to help comprehend or understand what they are reading. If you can summarize a book or article, it is a good indication that you are able to understand what you’ve read.”
2. Say: “Before we begin reading today’s article, can anyone tell me what they already know about bull sharks? (Call on students). We know that they are a type of animal. We also know that they are very big shark. I think I would like to learn a little more about this sea creature.” (Write on whiteboard as students come up with already known facts).
3. Say: “Now, let's talk more about summarization. Everybody take out a marker and a sheet of paper. Turn your paper horizontal, and make it into it into three different sections. Okay, now let's look at our "Rules of Summarizing" poster. Can someone read the first rule of summarizing? Yes, the first rule of summarizing is to delete the unimportant information. We don’t want to keep any repeated information. Everybody write this rule at the top of the first column on your piece of paper. It is very useful to make a line through unimportant information if you can mark on the article you are reading, but if you are reading a book you will probably have to make a note in your head that certain parts may not be very important compared to other information. This will help you to understand the message the author is trying to tell you. Now look at the second rule. The second rule is to find the most important information. Everybody write this rule at the top of the second column. When you find something that is important in the book or article you are reading, underline or highlight the sentence so that you can go back and remember that it must be important. The final rule of summarization is to make a topic sentence. Everybody write this rule at the top of the third column on your paper. Making a topic sentence can be very challenging because most texts don't have topic sentences incorporated. 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. I am going to pass out a copy of an article about bull sharks. We have already discussed some facts that we already knew about this sea creature, so there may be some information in this article that you already know. However, I want you to read through this article anyway and see if you can learn even more.”
“Bull sharks grow to be about 7- 11.5 feet in length and can weigh anywhere between 200-500 pounds.
Bull sharks eat almost anything but their diet mainly consists to fish
Bull sharks need to keep salt in their bodies in order to survive but they have adapted to be able to keep their bodies full of salt so they can also go into freshwater areas of the ocean.”
5. Say: “Before we begin to summarize, it is important that we understand the vocabulary used throughout this article. Does anyone know what the word adaptation means? (Wait for students to respond). Right, an adaptation is a special skill which helps an animal to survive and do everything it needs to do. A good example sentence would be ‘The bull shark adapted to be able to swim all around the world’ What about the world carnivore? A carnivore is an animal which eats only meat. For example, ‘A bull shark is a carnivore that mainly eats fish.’ It is important that we recognize and understand all of the vocabulary in a story before we can start to summarize.”
6. Say: “Now that we have examined some new vocabulary we are ready to summarize. Let’s look at the first paragraph together. I’ll start with the first sentence: Bull sharks are the most dangerous sharks in the world, according to many experts. Do you think it is important that we know bull sharks are the most dangerous sharks in the world? If we were telling someone who didn’t know anything about bull sharks, I think it would be important that they know how dangerous bull sharks are because that is what they are known for. I don’t think that we necessarily would have to tell them that they usually live up to 16 years old. To me, this information seems a little unnecessary. Since the goal of summarizing is to eliminate redundant and unimportant information, I wouldn’t include this particular information in my summary. Now let’s move on to the second and third sentence: This is because they're an aggressive species of shark, and they tend to hunt in waters where people often swim: along tropical shorelines. Bull sharks live throughout the world, in shallow, warm ocean waters. Use your summarization rules to take a closer look at this sentence. First, let’s delete the trivial or unimportant information. I do not think it would be important to know that they are aggressive, since we already know they are the most dangerous sharks, so we could delete that sentence. I do think it is important to know that bull sharks live throughout the. Now, what is our third rule? We need to make a topic sentence for this paragraph. Based on the information we underline and deleted in the first three sentences, does anyone have any ideas for a topic sentence for this paragraph? (Allow several students to give their ideas and give feedback based on answers.) I think my topic sentence might be something like, ‘Bull sharks are the most dangerous sharks, who live all over the world.’
7. Say: “Now that we have finished summarizing the first paragraph together, I am going to let you work on summarizing the second two paragraphs. Remember to use your summarization rules to delete unimportant information, highlight important information, and form a topic sentence. You will need to use your piece of paper with the rules listed in columns to organize your summary. On the back of your paper, please write a topic sentence for each paragraph. When you are done, you may turn your papers in at the front of the classroom.”
Assessment: I will review each student’s column chart and topic sentence to determine if they have a good grasp on comprehension and summary. I will use the assessment checklist to record each child’s score. Although answers may vary, the checklist will help me to be sure to check for specific elements of accurately summarizing articles or short stores. I have also added some questions below that can be used to check for comprehension.
Comprehension Questions:
1. Are bull sharks dangerous?
2. Where do bull sharks live?
3. What kind of animals do bull sharks eat?
Assessment Checklist:
Student Name __________________________________________
1. Did the student fill out the chart on his/her paper?
2. Did the student 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 words and/or phrases?
5. Did the student use the important information to come up with a topic sentence?
Resources:
https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/animals/fish/facts/bull-shark