Reading to Learn

Jumping into Summarization

Rationale:

As readers become more fluent, another goal of reading well is reading comprehension. Reading comprehension is the ability to comprehend what the text is saying as well as the message that the text conveys. In order to achieve this goal, a reader can use summarization to understand the overall message of a text. Teaching the about-point method, which asks two important questions, 1) What is the text about? and 2) What is the main point the article is saying about that topic?, is helpful for readers to summarize the texts they read. In this lesson, students will learn to summarize a passage by highlighting and focusing on the important information while crossing out the irrelevant information and describing the text in a few sentences.

Materials:

· Poster with summarization steps

· Marker and highlighter (for teacher)

· Highlighters (one for each students)

· Notebook Paper

· Pencils (one for each student)

· Copies of reading comprehension quiz for each student

· Individual printed copies of the National Geographic Kids article about kangaroos https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/kangaroo/

Procedures:

1. Say: “Has anyone ever recommended their favorite book to a friend? (allow students to raise hands). Did you share every detail about the book that you read or just focused on the most important parts of the story? Exactly! When we tell someone about something that we have read, we only need to tell them the important parts of the story they will need to know. This is what we call summarizing. Summarizing helps us communicate and share with others every day. We can also use summarizing to better understand what we read and show that you understand the story.”

2. Say: “When using summarizing, there are three rules that we must follow in order to summarize texts correctly. The first rule is to mark out any information in the story that is not important. Second, highlight the important information and terms in the story. The third rule is to create a topic sentence based on the umbrella terms and the highlighted text. Now that we know these rules, we can use them for summarization.”

3. Say: “When we summarize a story, we only read a little bit of it at a time. After we are done reading each small part, we look back on it and determine what the most important parts of the story are. Remember, we cross out what we don’t need and highlight what is important which means we need to be very selective when highlighting.”

4. Say: “Now I am going to show you how to summarize. We are going to read an article on kangaroos. Book talk: “In the article, we are given a lot of information about kangaroos and specifically about how they live in “troops” and care for their baby kangaroos called “joeys”. Let’s now all read the article to find out more about kangaroos! Do any of you know how a kangaroo takes care of their babies? (Let students raise their hands and answer). I am first going to read the first paragraph of the article.”

“Kangaroos possess powerful hind legs, a long, strong tail, and small front legs. Kangaroos belong to the animal family Macropus, literally “big foot”. Thanks to their large feet, kangaroos can leap some 30 feet (9 meters) in a single bound and travel more than 30 miles (48 kilometers) per hour.”

5. Say: “Before we go over how to summarize this paragraph, let’s look at some words in this paragraph that might not be familiar to you. The first word is “possess”. Possess means that someone has something, in other words it belongs to them. What is this article saying that kangaroos possess? Right, they possess powerful hind legs. Another tricky word in the article would be “opponents”. An opponent is someone who fights against someone else, specifically for kangaroos this means their predators. (Ask students to come up with a sentence that the word opponent can be used in). Now that we have gone over some vocabulary in the text that might be unfamiliar, let’s summarize!

6. In this first paragraph there is a lot of useful information. I will now use a highlighter to highlight the important parts of this paragraph. I am first going to highlight “Kangaroos possess powerful hind legs” since this is key information about kangaroos and how they move. Next, I would also highlight “Kangaroos belong to the animal family Macropus” since this explains what animal family they belong to. Don’t forget, we will also use a pencil to mark out any information that is not needed like “a long, strong tail, and small front legs.”

7. Say: “Now that I have shown you how to summarize, let’s summarize the next paragraph together.

“Kangaroos live in Eastern Australia. They live in small groups called troops or herds (“mobs” by Australians), typically made up of 50 or more animals. If threatened, kangaroos pound the ground with their strong feet in warning. Fighting kangaroos kick opponents, and sometimes bite.”

8. Say: “Let’s highlight the most important parts of this paragraph and cross out the parts that are not. Do you think that kangaroos kicking their opponents is important? (Allow students time to answer) I agree, I don’t think that part is very important either. (Give students time to work with a partner to decide what are the important parts of the paragraph).”

9. Say: “Now that I have shown you and we have summarized together, you will continue to summarize this article on your own. I want each of you to read the rest of the article on kangaroos that I have printed for each of you. Once you are done reading, come to my desk and I will give you a Summarizing Checklist from me. This will help you write a summary of the article based on the highlighted information that you found. It is okay if your summary is short, because a summary is supposed to be a brief version of the article. When you are done with the checklist, share your written summary with a partner and discuss your similarities and differences. The last thing we will do is take a quiz!”

Summary Checklist:

Did I….

____ Highlight the important details

____ Cross out what is not important

____ Write my topic sentence

____ Write a 3-5 sentence summary

Assessment checklist:

Did this student….

_____ Find and focus on important information

_____ Reduce the article from the original

_____ Create a topic sentence based on the highlighted information

_____ Support their topic sentence with a short 3-5 sentence summary