Stomping into Summarization
By: Caitlin Brown
Rationale:
Comprehension is the most vital and also the final step to student’s reading development. When a student reads for comprehension, they are no longer spending time decoding words, instead, they are focused on understanding the message of the text. A great way to test a student’s comprehension is to get them to summarize a book they have read. In this lesson, students will practice summarization as a comprehension strategy. The students will summarize text by selecting important information and eliminating unnecessary details. Students will use the following summarization rules: detect and mark out unimportant or repeated information, find and highlight important information, and form a topic sentence from the important information. The teacher will model how students detect important information that is needed to write an effective summary.
Materials:
Procedures:
Vocabulary List:
International– existing, occurring, or carried on between two or more nations. (Example Sentence: Students who attend school with us from a different country are interational students.)
Confiscated – take away someone else’s property with authority. (Example Sentence: I confiscated the student’s pocket knife because they were not supposed to have weapons at school.)
tusks – a long pointed tooth that comes out of an animal’s closed mouth as in the elephant, walrus or wild boar. (Example Sentence: The elephant used his tusks to fight off the lion trying to eat his young.)
illegally – to do something that is forbidden by set laws. (Example Sentence: Jonny took money from the bank illegally.)
poaching – to kill, hunt or steal animals without the landowner’s permission. (Example Sentence: People overseas use poaching to gain articles from animals that they can sell to make money.)
petition – a formal written request that is signed by many people that is appealed or agreed upon by an authority figure to a particular cause. (Example Sentence: The students signed a petition to rid the idea of homework every afternoon.)
accomplishments – something that has been achieve successfully. (Example Sentence: When the student moved up to the next grade, he knew then he had gained a great accomplishment.)
[The following is an example of a vocabulary review for the word illegally: First, define the word and read the example sentence above. Then ask sample questions using the word and have students complete sentence fragments.]
i. What is an example of something that is illegal?
ii. Are all bad doings illegal?
iii. Stealing is illegal because….
iv. Someone that might catch someone for doing something illegal might be?
Assessment Checklist:
Collect each student’s summary of the article and evaluate the summarization using the following checklist.
________ Collected important information
________ Ignored trivia and examples in summary
________ Significantly reduced the text from the original
________ Sentences brought ideas together from each paragraph
________ Sentences organized coherently into essay form
Comprehension Quiz:
Name: _________________________
References:
Comprehension is the most vital and also the final step to student’s reading development. When a student reads for comprehension, they are no longer spending time decoding words, instead, they are focused on understanding the message of the text. A great way to test a student’s comprehension is to get them to summarize a book they have read. In this lesson, students will practice summarization as a comprehension strategy. The students will summarize text by selecting important information and eliminating unnecessary details. Students will use the following summarization rules: detect and mark out unimportant or repeated information, find and highlight important information, and form a topic sentence from the important information. The teacher will model how students detect important information that is needed to write an effective summary.
Materials:
- Paper for each student
- Pencils for each student
- Highlighters for each student
- Individual copies of the article: “Kids Help Elephants” written for kids on kids.nationalgeographic.com (URL below)
- SmartBoard or white board and writing utensil for teacher use
- Poster of Summarizing Rules:
- Delete and mark out unimportant or repeated information
- Find and highlight important information
- Form a topic sentence from the important information
- Assessment Checklist
- Comprehension Quiz
Procedures:
- Say: Can anyone tell me if they have ever read a book that you found interesting, so you told your friend about it? Did you tell them every little detail, or did you just tell them the important parts that you read? [Call on a student who has their hand raised.] Yes, that’s right, you only told them the important parts of the story! This is called summarizing. Summarizing is a skill that can help us to better understand the books we read, therefore making us better readers! If you can summarize a book or an article, then that lets me know you understand the material that you have read.
- Say: When using summarization skills, we have a few guidelines to follow. [Hold up poster with summarizing rules and hang somewhere in the classroom for students to refer back to.] First, we need to get rid of any unimportant information in the text. To do that, we read through the entire article and then we go delete any information that is unnecessary or is repeated anywhere in the text. Then, we highlight, underline, or circle the things that seem really important to us! Finally, we take all of those important parts of the article or story and we create a topic sentence to begin our summary.
- Say: A really good way to summarize and create topic sentences is to find an “umbrella term” that all of the ideas in a passage can fall under! An example of this would be if I was reading a passage that told me about different types of fish, sharks, and jellyfish that live in the ocean, my umbrella term could be sea creatures, because fish and sharks and jellyfish are all sea creatures and that’s what the passage is about!
- Say: I’m going to model how I’d use these summarization guidelines with the first paragraph of an article about kids helping elephants that we are going to read today. Have any of you ever seen an elephant in real life? Have you ever thought that you could be of help to an elephant? You’re going to get to find out all about if you as kids can actually help elephants when we read this article today!
- Say: Here is the first paragraph from the story:
“Thanks in part to the hard work of
three young girls, the Hong Kong government began May 15 to destroy the majority of its stockpile of confiscated elephant ivory. Nellie Shute, age 12, Christina Seigrist, age nine, and Lucky Lan Skrine, age 11, were attending international schools in Hong Kong when they learned what was happening to elephants. They formed the group Elephant Angels and collected more than 18,000 signatures asking the government to destroy the ivory.”
This paragraph is about three girls who attended international schools who learned about what was happening to elephants. Remember the word “international” means existing or occurring in two or more nations or countries, so at the beginning of the sentence we find out that these girls were studying overseas in a different place than the United States! Was there any information that you thought was unnecessary in this passage? What about that part we just talked about at the beginning? No? That’s right. We can delete the part where it says “thanks in part to the hard work of three young girls”! Do we need to know how many girls it was or if they worked hard or not? Not really, right? We can delete that information. Now, if I look at the information that is left, I can come up with an umbrella term for all of this information to go under. I think the main message of this passage is saving the elephants and their ivory tusks, so I’m going to make my umbrella term “saving the elephants”. Using the information that is left and my umbrella term, I can make a really good topic sentence: “The government in Hong Kong destroyed the rest of the elephant tusks that were stolen thanks to the help of Elephant Angels.” Now I have a really good topic sentence to summarize that paragraph to help me later summarize the entire article! - Say: Before you read the rest of the article, let’s go over some of our vocabulary words. Being familiar with new vocabulary words will help you have a better understanding of the meaning of the article.
- Say: Now I want you to practice summarizing with the rest of the article “Kids Help Elephants” Let’s read the rest of the article and see if we can help the elephants too! I want you to delete and highlight things from the passage, create a topic sentence, and then write a paragraph summarizing the main points of the article. Be sure to look at our summarizing rules if you forget anything. Also, be sure that this summary is in your own words and not your neighbor’s or the author’s. Summarization works best when you read the article slow, read the important parts at least two times, and take notes as you go. Taking notes will help you point out the main ideas easier. Be sure to ask questions if anything is confusing about the article and we will discuss it! We’ll be having a quiz once everyone is done writing and you’ll turn all of your work into me! [Walk around to be sure students are following the summarization rules and answer any questions they may have about the article and assignment.]
Vocabulary List:
International– existing, occurring, or carried on between two or more nations. (Example Sentence: Students who attend school with us from a different country are interational students.)
Confiscated – take away someone else’s property with authority. (Example Sentence: I confiscated the student’s pocket knife because they were not supposed to have weapons at school.)
tusks – a long pointed tooth that comes out of an animal’s closed mouth as in the elephant, walrus or wild boar. (Example Sentence: The elephant used his tusks to fight off the lion trying to eat his young.)
illegally – to do something that is forbidden by set laws. (Example Sentence: Jonny took money from the bank illegally.)
poaching – to kill, hunt or steal animals without the landowner’s permission. (Example Sentence: People overseas use poaching to gain articles from animals that they can sell to make money.)
petition – a formal written request that is signed by many people that is appealed or agreed upon by an authority figure to a particular cause. (Example Sentence: The students signed a petition to rid the idea of homework every afternoon.)
accomplishments – something that has been achieve successfully. (Example Sentence: When the student moved up to the next grade, he knew then he had gained a great accomplishment.)
[The following is an example of a vocabulary review for the word illegally: First, define the word and read the example sentence above. Then ask sample questions using the word and have students complete sentence fragments.]
i. What is an example of something that is illegal?
ii. Are all bad doings illegal?
iii. Stealing is illegal because….
iv. Someone that might catch someone for doing something illegal might be?
Assessment Checklist:
Collect each student’s summary of the article and evaluate the summarization using the following checklist.
________ Collected important information
________ Ignored trivia and examples in summary
________ Significantly reduced the text from the original
________ Sentences brought ideas together from each paragraph
________ Sentences organized coherently into essay form
Comprehension Quiz:
Name: _________________________
- Where were the girls at when they created the petition called Elephants Angels?
- Why were the elephants such an important topic in Hong Kong?
- What did the results of the girls’ petition suggest?
- What other things have the girls and other people done in order to save the elephants from poachers?
- What has the most recent petition led the girls to do next?
References: