Rationale: When reading, the overall goal is comprehending the text. Reading comprehension is a reader fully understands the overall message of the passage. The best away to get the message is to use summarization. We can use umbrella terms which is a word or phrase that helps us shorten the message.  In this lesson, each student will learn how to summarize by finding and highlighting the most important information and then describing the passage.

 

Materials:

• Projector with the paragraph from the article typed out so the class can see it

• Computer where you can highlight on word document (for teacher)

• Highlighters

• Notebook Paper

• Pencils

• Copies of Spotted Salamander (Kids National Geographic)

Procedures:

1. Summarization is important: Say: “It is hard to remember every single detail you read. The key to be a good reader is to summarize. Summarizing is how we take large amounts of text and only keep the most important parts. The best readers use this strategy to remember the parts that most important to the author.”

2. Project an example of the summarization & review summarization steps: 

   1. Say: “This is how we summarize”

   2. The first thing we do is cross out all the information that is unimportant and not essential to the main point of the text.

   3. The second thing we do is highlight what we think is the most important information in the text.

   4. After gathering information, write a main topic sentence from the text that you highlighted.

3. Say: “Now, I am going to show you to summarize with some paragraphs about salamander which all of the class will be able to read today”

   1. Book talk: Who thinks salamanders are really cool? Did you know that there are spotted salamanders? What do you think they are best known for?

4. Teach class about important vocabulary in the passage:

   1. Say: “Understanding important vocabulary in the passage is very important for reading comprehension. As a class, we are going to go over certain words that you will see while reading the article about sea turtles.” 

   2. Words in article: distinctly, deter

   3. Example: Say: “Deter is one of the words in your passage so let’s look at what it means. Deter means to discourage someone or something from doing something by instilling fear. An animal will try to deter their prey, so they don’t attack.

5. Project one section of the article about the salamanders and have the summarization rules on the board. Pass out the article to each student along with a highlight and pencil.

   1. Say: “This is a paragraph from our article. I am going to show you how I would summarize this section. You can follow along do it with me on your own. Let’s go back and review how to summarize:

i.The first thing we do is cross out all the information that is unimportant and not essential to the main point of the text.

ii.The second thing we do is highlight what we think is the most important information in the text.

iii.After gathering information, write a main topic sentence from the text that you highlighted.

In the section, I will begin by crossing out any unimportant information. I can cross out the beginning of sentence two because it’s not really important. Next, I will highlight what is important. I think that sentence 1 and part of sentence 2 is important so I will highlight both.

 

The last thing that I need to do is form a topic sentence from what I highlighted. Write on board so students can see: Spotted salamander live mainly in the forests near rivers and prey on insects, worms, slugs, and spiders.

 

1. Students Summarize:

   1. Say: “It is now your turn to use summarization rules that I just showed an example of”

   2. Use paragraph of article

   3. What part of this section do you think we can cross out? (wait for response) Cross out the ones that they’ve agreed on. What are we left with? Now let’s use the sentences left to create a topic sentence and summarize. 

2. Students write own topic sentence. Pass out paper for students.

   1. Now Say: “I would like you to complete the rest of the article on your own and make a topic sentence for every paragraph. When completed, you will have a good summary of the important parts of this article. Now, you will probably remember the main facts about spotted salamanders. You should only summarize the important information. When you are done, we will have a short quiz.”

3. Assessment:

   1. Collect each article summaries

i.Collected important information

ii.Ignored trivia and examples

iii.Significantly reduced the text from the original

iv.Sentence brought ideas together

v.Sentences organized coherently into essay form

1. Quiz:

   1. Where do spotted salamanders live usually?

   2. What type of animal is this?

   3. How long is their life span?

   4. What do spotted salamander look like?

   5. What do salamanders eat?

   6. Answers: forests, amphibian, up to 20 years, bluish-black with yellow spots, insects

References:

 https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/animals/amphibians/spotted-salamander/

https://jessiekfloyd.wixsite.com/lessondesigns/reading-to-learn 

http://wp.auburn.edu/rdggenie/