Rationale: 

The goal of reading is for students to achieve reading comprehension. In order to become better readers,

we must truly understand what we are reading.  One way to for beginning readers to improve

comprehension is to learn how to summarize.

Summarization is one of the two most powerful strategies for comprehending text. To summarize is

to take all the important details and main ideas out of a text and combine them in a way that explains

the story. Basically, summarization is where you find an umbrella term for the events that happen in the

text. This lesson helps students learn how to find main ideas and key details in a text by having the teacher

model summarization and then by summarizing themselves. The teacher will show the strategy of

summarizing by explicitly modeling how to pick out important details and eliminate unimportant ones,

and then guide students through summarizing their own passages. The students will be assessed on their

summarization skills through comprehension questions.

 

Materials: 

1. Paper, pencil and highlighter for each student

2. Summarization checklist for each student (see below)

3. Comprehension quiz for each student (see below)

4. Class copies of Bull Shark article 

5. Class copies of Goblin Shark article

6. Bookmark with summarization rules

 

Procedures:

1. Say: “Today we are going to learn how to summarize. Summarizing means picking out the most important parts and information of a book, article, or story and explaining it to someone. When we read a text, we could spend all day trying to remember all the words and details of that text. Good readers do not try to remember every little detail that they read. Instead, they use summarization strategies to remember only the important points the author is making about the topic. Today we are going to learn and practice three steps that will help us remember the important information we need to understand the text.”

2. Say: Before we start reading, I am going to pass around a bookmark that shares the four secrets to summarization on it. Let’s read the four secrets together. 1)Delete unimportant information, Can anyone tell me how they know what information would be unimportant? Right! It is information that doesn’t pertain to the main idea. 2) highlight important information, 3) ignore small details, 4) superordinate and form a topic sentence. Make sure you keep track of your bookmark because these secrets are key to good summarization. 

3.    Say: The article that we are going to read today is about Bull Sharks. Pass out article to every student. Has anyone ever seen a Bull Shark? Wait for responses. Well today we are going to learn all about them! As you are reading, remember to pay attention to the secrets to summarization on your bookmarks! After you finish reading the whole article, I want you to write a one or two sentence summary of this article. Should our summary be longer than the article itself? Wait for responses. No, it shouldn’t.  

4.     When students finish reading and writing their summaries say: Class, I am going to read a paragraph of article out loud and then we are going to try to figure out the most important part of the paragraph and create a few summary sentences, based off what you all think.

5.     Say- Now that we have read one paragraph of this article, I want y'all to finish the article on your own. We will then talk about the most important parts of this article. Once we have discussed some important parts of this article, we will use our class summaries to create a topic sentence. We need to ask ourselves a few questions like: What is this article about? What is the main idea of this article? What happens in this article? What does the author of this article want me to know about bull sharks? 

6.     After we have class discussion about the article and construct a class summary say: Since all of you did such a great job reading that article and generating a summary, we are going to read another article about a different kind of shark. This shark is different than a bull shark because it mainly swims and hunts in the deep waters on the coast of Japan. This shark is a Goblin Shark!  

7.     Say: Now what do we do if there is a word that we do not understand in the text? For example, in the bull shark article, I could may not understand the word, “aggressive”. I would ask myself: What do I think this word means? Does it have something to do with a shark’s behavior?? What does his word have to do with sharks? I would then look up the word in the dictionary. This would help me figure out that the word means to ready to attack or confront. This means that bull sharks are dangerous and ready to attack. Now I would need to use this word in a sentence. Here is my sentence I want each of you to complete: Bull sharks are dangerous because they are _______  and tend to hunt where people often swim (aggressive). Now I want each of you to write a sentence using this word correctly. I will walk around the room and check their sentences to see if they used the word correctly. Can anyone give me an example? Great! It is important to recognize that this word is a crucial piece of the article and that it would not make as much sense without it.

1. I  am going to pass out an article to everyone and I want everyone to read it and highlight important information with your highlighter. After you have read the article, try to come up with a topic sentence. 

2.  I will walk around the room and see how everyone is doing. Say- Everyone’s writing is looking great! Let’s remind ourselves to pick out the important details to back up our main idea while we read. Once this is done, everyone should have the information to write a summary. 

10.  Say: When everyone has completed this task, please bring me your two summaries. I will then go to check over their summaries and review each students’ work.  (see summary checklist below) 

1. After the assessment regarding their summaries, I will then ask students to answer a few questions about the text. This will allow me to check their comprehension and understanding of the text. ( see below) 

 

Summary Checklist for students:

Did I…

___ write a topic sentence?

___ find/ highlight supporting details to help answer the question?

___ remove unimportant information by crossing it out ?

___ remove repeated ideas?

___ create a 3-5 sentence summary?

 

Summary Assessment for teacher to evaluate student’s summarizations:

___ did the student pick out the most important information?

___ did the student delete unnecessary information?

___ did the student fully understand the information in the article?

___ did the student write a strong topic sentence?

___ did the student write strong sentences summarizing the important parts of the text?

 

Comprehension questions for “Goblin Shark”

1. The goblin shark usually lives at the _____ of the ocean along the continental edges 

2. Goblin sharks are what color?

3. Explain where goblin sharks got their name

4. True of False: Scientists have large amounts of information on goblin sharks?

5. How do they make up for their slow pace?

 

References:

Ally Cross, Ice Cream for Summaries!- https://sites.google.com/view/ally-cross-reading-lessons/reading-to-learn 

Megan Schrock, Swimming into Summarization- https://meganschrock.wixsite.com/mysite/reading-to-learn-design 

Bull Shark Article, National Geographic - https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/animals/fish/facts/bull-shark 

Goblin Shark Article, National Geographic - https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/animals/fish/facts/goblin-shark 

Murray, Bruce. (2012). Making Sight Words.