Reading Fluency Design | katieclarkslessons

Swimming Like Marlins into Summarization

Rationale: Comprehension, understanding the meaning of words, is the final step in becoming a successful reader. The student is no longer decoding texts, but now discussing the meaning of the words they have read. In order to test a student’s comprehension of the text it is best to summarize a book they have read. In this lesson students will practice summarization as a comprehension strategy. Each student will summarize the text by eliminating unnecessary details and selecting important information. Students will use the following summarization rules to successfully summarize the text: detect and mark out unimportant or repeated information, find and highlight important information, and form a topic sentence from the important points in the text that were highlighted. The teacher will model how students can detect important information that is needed to write an effective summary.

Materials:

Paper for each student
Pencils for each student
Highlighters for each student
Black colored pencil (or something to mark
Individual copies of the article: “National Geographic for Kids: Blue Marlin”
Passage Sample on SmartBoard from “National Geographic for Kids: Blue Marlin” (First paragraph)
Rubric for summarization

Procedures:

Say: “Ok class today we are going to talk about summarization. Can anyone tell me what it means to summarize a story? Summarizing is taking the most important information from a story and putting it in your own words. Just to give everyone an idea about some important information that is commonly included in a summary we are looking for: main ideas, important characters, important statistics, or really things that a character does depending on what you are reading. When you are summarizing you are leaving out the unimportant details. When do you think you would use summarization? Yes! To make a long article or book easier to remember by only giving the main points.
Say: “I have given you an article from National Geographic about blue marlins. These fish as very interesting because they are actually the one of the fastest fish in the world. Today we are going to be investigative scientists and as we read the first paragraph together I want us all to look out for only the important details. Since we are reading the first paragraph together I am going to help us all summarize before we do it on our own. So, as investigative scientists, let us all pay attention to the main points of each sentence and make a mental note every time we read something we didn’t already know. Ok now let’s all sit up straight, open our ears, and read along as I read the first paragraph aloud.
Say: “Ok now that we have read our first paragraph who can give me a summary of that paragraph we just read? (Give a few different students a chance to share their summary, write down some of their main points on the board). Put up smartboard copy of the paragraph with highlights made. “Notice how I highlighted the important details and crossed out the words that are unnecessary. This helps me keep my facts straight and focused on the main idea. Ok let’s do another sentence together I need some helpers!

Just how big is a blue marlin? can (4.3 meters) in length and can (900 kilograms)!

Say,” Let’s review, the main topic or the first sentence of the paragraph will tell us what the paragraph is going to be about. The first sentence talks about female marlins and how big they can grow, I highlighted both of these points because we need to know how big they are, it is a main point. We do not need to know the conversion of meters, so I crossed that out. When I crossed this out, I thought before I act: ‘Is this fact necessary?’ and then I crossed it out because it is unnecessary in helping me understand blue marlins. There is a lot of facts about blue marlins so when you are working on finding the main points highlight items that answer these questions: Who? What? Where? When? Why?”
Say, “Now that we have reviewed I am going to give each one of you a pencil and a highlighter. As you read the article, highlight details that you think are important and contribute to the main idea of the story. Take the black colored pencil and cross out the details that you think are unimportant and do not contribute to the main idea of the story. The main idea of this story is to give you more information on the blue marlins. There is a lot of information on the blue marlins, so pick facts that are main ideas and answer the questions who, what, where, when, and why?
Say,” For the next activity after you have finished marking your story I want you to summarize the story in 6 sentences or less. Remember only to include the details you highlighted, not the ones you crossed out. Write in complete sentences and watch your punctuation and spelling. But remember to rephrase all of your own highlights, we do not want to copy the text.
Say, “But before you read let’s all review some vocabulary from the article so that when you come across these in the article you have an idea of what they mean!” (Write the list of words on the board and provide the students with example.

Predator- an animal that naturally preys on others. An example would be, “Killer whales are predators because they are at the top of the food chain. What kind of animal besides a blue marlin do you think is a predator? Lets all turn to our partner and share the animal we are thinking of.”