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Shaking up Summarizations!

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                By: Victoria Olney 

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Reading to learn lesson design:

 

Rationale: Summarization is an important comprehension strategy for students to be able to understand all of the new information they take in when reading. This lesson will teach students how to summarize what they are reading and ultimately learn how to find meaning of what they have read.

 

Materials

1.Class set of Non-fiction books (such as a science or history book, textbook)

2.Highlighters for each child

3. Marker

4. Paper

5. Pencil

6. various Kids National Geographic magazines

 

Procedure:
1. I’m excited we are going to learn how to summarize an article. It is a great tool to have when learning. "When summarizing a text, you create a shorter version of what you read, so delete any words that are not important or that is repeated in the text. For example, if I read a passage such as ‘I made a cake. Tomorrow is my Dad’s birthday. I used blue frosting. He liked the cake.’ I could summarize the passage by saying ‘I made a cake with blue frosting for my dad’s birthday tomorrow.’ Do you see how I took out the extra words to make a shorter sentence as opposed to have a lot of sentences? Today we are going to be summarizing just like I just did. We will focus on what the main idea is, what facts support the main idea, and what information we can remove.

 


2. I will have students title a piece of paper with their name,  and have it ready for Important information from their article in their textbooks and silently read. "I want everyone to read the text silently. Be thinking about some of the important points in the story and write down some bullet points on a piece of paper."


3. Once the children have finished reading the assigned pages and making notes about the main points, I will pass out copies of the text they just read. "We are now going to summarize what we just finished reading. On the copy of the text I just gave you, The first step in summarization is picking out the most important details and underlining or highlighting them. you can look at the bullet points you wrote down right after you read for help." After the students do this, we will then discuss each of these facts as a class. "After you highlight the main points, I want you to take your marker and mark through all of the information you don't feel is important. This is the information that the author included in the text to add to the overall text, but does not need to be put in our summary." Additionally, summaries should always be shorter in length than the information you are summarizing


4. "Next we will go through the text and choose out what was critical and what is not, I want you to write the highlighted information. Make sure you leave out all the words you marked out." Have the students create the summarization like you showed them earlier in the session.


5. Once everyone is done have some students to read their summaries to the class. Have the students to listen and see if their summary is similar to the one being read.

Assessment: To evaluate the children’s summarization abilities, The children will be able to choose an article to read quietly and will summarize that article with 3 to 5 sentences independently. Teacher will make sure they included the main ideas of the story and left out information that is irrelevant. This will demonstrate an understanding of summarization.

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Summarization Assessment Checklist: Gather all the students’ summaries of the article and evaluate their summaries using the following checklist:

            _____ Student collected important information for their main point.

            _____ Student ignored examples and minute details throughout the summary.

            _____ Students meaningfully reduced the text from the original article.

            _____ Students created sentences that incorporated ideas together from each paragraph.  

            _____ Students created sentences that were organized logically into essay form.

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Comprehension Quiz:

1. If someone asks you to help find their missing cat but you do not know them, do you help them do it?

2. Can we tell which strangers are dangerous and which strangers are safe?

3. What is a whereabout?

4. Who are three people that would need to know your whereabouts before you leave the house?

5. Is it best to travel by yourself or with a buddy when you go places?

6. Is it smart to go play in a dark, isolated street just because it is fun?

7. When is a time that we can get in the car with a stranger?

8. A stranger came up to me and offered me a Gatorade. I really love Gatorade. Should I take this Gatorade and drink it?

9. What is something we could do with our voices if we feel in danger from a stranger?

10. If you feel like you are not in a good situation and not safe, should you do something about it? Should you tell an adult, call 911, or should you think that it is silly to come up with such a thing? 

 

Reference:

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