Reading to Learn

Reading to Learn Design

One Small step for Summarization, One Giant Leap for Comprehension

By Lindsey Cleary

Rationale:

The goal of reading is for students to comprehend what they read. In order to become better readers, we must truly understand what we are reading. One way for beginning readers to improve comprehension is to learn how to sort information into what is important and what is not. 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. In this lesson, the teacher will model picking out significant details. The students will then summarize their own passages, increasing their ability to comprehend and ask deeper questions.

Materials:

1. white board

2. Paper for each student

3. Pencil for each student

4. Class copies of “Moon Facts for Kids”

5. Summarization Assessment Checklist

6. Comprehension quiz for each student

Procedures:

1. Say: “Raise your hand if you have ever had such a fun day that you immediately wanted to tell someone all about. When you told them did you tell them every single thing that happened that day? You probably left out a few unimportant moments. This is an example of summarization.”

2. Say: “Now that you all are becoming fluent readers, we are going to learn how to summarize to help us comprehend and understand what we are reading. Summarization is helpful because it can be hard to remember every detail of what we read. It helps us look at the important points, rather than the whole text. We are going to look at an article and see if we can identify the important details together. As we summarize, we are going to be focusing on the main idea, looking for supporting details, and what information we can leave out and still understand the story.”

3. Say: “In order to successfully summarize, we are going to summarize our text by using the about-point method. This method has us ask ourselves two questions after reading the article: what the text is about and what is the main point the writer is trying to make? To help us answer the second question, we need to think of an umbrella term or a category to combine all the important points made in the text. (Have students copy down the about-point method written on the white board). How do we know what information isn’t necessary? Right! It is information that doesn’t involve our main idea.

4. Say: “Now that we know our key strategies for helping us summarize, let’s look at an article and I’ll show you how I would summarize. I am going to show you how I would do these steps of summarization with a short article the moon!” Can anyone guess how old the moon is? (Students raise their hand and offer possible answers). The moon is almost 5 billion years old!

5. Say: “In order to summarize and understand what we are reading, it is important to make sure we know what all the words in the passage mean. Let’s look at the first new word, crater. A crater is a bowl-shaped dent in the ground. The word is used in the passage, “The surface [of the moon] is covered in craters, pits, and scars.” We could use our context clues to see that a crater is similar to a pit. Now that we know what crater means, can you see how it fits into the sentence? How can you use crater in a sentence?” (repeat modeling process for the remaining vocabulary words). Vocabulary words: crater, telescope, atmosphere, satellite

6. Say: “Let’s read this paragraph from our piece about the moon!”

“The moon came about when a large object hit the Earth and blasted out rocks that all came together and orbited round the Earth. Eventually they all melted together like in a big heated pot, cooled down and became the Moon. For another 500 million years pieces of rock kept striking against the surface of the Moon. You can see the surface of the Moon by using a pair of binoculars or a small telescope. The Moon’s surface shows the damage caused by these large pieces of rock hitting it billions of years ago. The surface is covered in craters, pits and scars. The first man to make proper maps of the moon was Galileo. He didn’t invent the telescope but by 1609 he had developed a telescope that could magnify objects up to 20 times. It was with this that he started to study that awesome moon. Glad he did so that we know all this cool stuff and it was the start of the telescope as we know it today.”

“We can see that the article is about what the surface of the moon looks like. The author makes a point that we use a telescope to see the craters and scars on the moon. We can combine these ideas to create a summary: The surface of the moon is covered in craters and scars that we can see through a telescope.”

7. Say: “Now it’s your turn to try the about-point method!”

“Ever heard of Neil Armstrong? Well in case you haven’t, he was the very first person, to put his footsteps on the moon, isn’t that amazing! He stepped out of his spacecraft, the Eagle, on 21 July 1969 and said these very famous words: ‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’.”

“What is this paragraph telling us? A man landing on the moon. What is the point of the paragraph? Neil Armstrong stepped out of the Eagle and took the first steps on the moon. Very nice!

8. Say: “We are going to continue this process for each paragraph of this article. Once you have the main ideas written down, put them together in paragraph form. Now that we have practiced this together, I want you to continue to work individually on this task. This will help you remember the important facts about the moon. After everyone has finished, we will take a short quiz to see what you remember about the moon.”

Assessment: Collect the student’s summaries and evaluate with the “Summarization Assessment Checklist”

Summary Assessment Checklist:

_____ Used important information strictly from the article (Yes or No)

_____ No trivial details are included (Yes or No)

_____ Summary uses complete sentences (Yes or No)

_____ Contains an idea from each section of the article (Yes or No)

_____ Organized summary into a paragraph (Yes or No)

Comprehension Quiz:

1. How was the moon formed?

2. How can we see the surface of the moon?

3. Why did the USA consider setting off a bomb on the moon?

4. Why can we see what happened on the moon billions of years ago?