RL Design
Reading to Learn
Title: Diving Deep Into Summaries
Rationale: Summarization is helpful in order to bring and understand the most important parts of the story or text into the student’s mind. The student can then comprehend the text, and it can help them understand exactly what the story is trying to show them. It will teach comprehension because of the research-based procedures, and the experiments that have been done with this in the past. Summarization combines the most important points of a text, and it presents it in a way that can help the students comprehend the text more than they could in the past. When you are able to summarize a story, you are telling the most important part of the story to your best friend. When a student can do this, they have understood and comprehended just what the story had to tell them. This can be done without unnecessary information, and it can be told in only a few sentences.
Materials:
Individual copies of the National Geographic Kids article about hippos: https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/hippopotamus/
Pencils for each student
Paper for each student
Summarization steps
Poster for teacher with paragraph written
Thick Sharpie for Teacher
Highlighter for Teacher
Highlighters for each student
Summarization Checklist for each student
Comprehension quiz for each student
Procedure:
1. Explain to children why summarization is an important skill to learn: “When you read a new story, it is really hard to remember every single thing about that story. Think about if you had to remember every word and every detail! Whew! That would be impossible! Good readers who comprehend the stories do not have to do this. They summarize the text. Summarizing is when we take a really large and reduce it into its own bare essentials. It is the main idea, the gist, or the points of the story that are ‘worth telling.’ Good readers use summarizations so that way they do not have to know all of the points of the story, but they can only know the most important points.”
2. Put poster onto board and write out two questions we ask ourselves.
3. Explain the two questions method: “When we summarize, we have to ask ourselves two questions. First, ‘What is the text about?’ Next, this is the hardest question to answer. ‘What is the main point that the author is trying to make about that topic?’ Once you answer these two questions, you can form a summarization.
4. Put poster onto board and write out the three things that we will do to summarize.
5. Say: “When we summarize, we are going to do three things. First, cross out any unimportant or repeated information (or fluff) that is not essential to the text. Second, Find and highlight important information that is essential to the text. Third, we need to form a topic sentence from the important information that we highlighted.”
6. Example how to do this with hippos: “I passed out an article to each of you! Is anyone’s favorite animal a hippo? Do you know anything about hippos? How awesome that our earth has so many cool animals, and a hippo is a huge animal that is one of them. Did you know that a hippo spends most of its life in the water? I want you all to read the article and see what else you can find out about hippos.
7. Explain vocabulary: “There will be important vocabulary to understand when we are reading about hippos, and one vocabulary word that you may not know is herbivore. Herbivore means that an animal only eats plants. A hippo is actually an herbivore! This means that they do not eat meat. Can anyone think of another animal that is an herbivore? [Call on students to answer.] This does not mean an animal that eats plants and other animals. That would be an omnivore. It also does not mean an animal that only eats other animals. That would be a carnivore. Can anyone think of an animal that is a carnivore? [Wait for answers.]
8. Hang poster onto the board, with the paragraph written. Take the sharpie and take the highlighter. Say: “Here is a paragraph from the story that you are about to read. I am going to show you how I summarize this paragraph, and you can do this with me on the paper. First, let’s cross out any unimportant or repeated information. Next, let’s highlight important information that we want to use in our summarization. Lastly, with the information I have, let’s form a great topic sentence all together! [write topic sentence]: Hippos have one leader in their group, and he fights off rivals while the rest are submerged to stay cool.
9. Here is a paragraph from the story:
Groups of hippos are led by one large male. The other members are females, their young, and a few young adult males. The leader of the group keeps control of his mating territory by fighting off rivals. The family group of hippos spends most of the day in the water. Staying submerged helps a hippo stay cool in the hot, tropical climate where it lives.
10. Now, I would like you to finish reading the article, and after you are finished, I would like you to go back and cross out words and sentences that are unimportant. Then, I would like you to highlight words and sentences that can be used in your main ideas. Once you are finished, Write 3 – 4 sentences maximum on the most important summarization of the story. Once you are finished, turn in both, and then grab the small quiz.
Assessment: [Collect the student’s summarization of the article, and then evaluate the following checklist:]
______ Collected important information
______ Ignored trivia and examples in summary
______ Significantly reduced the text from the original
______ Sentences brought ideas together from each paragraph
______ Sentences organized coherently into essay form
Quiz: [Pass out a quiz to each student.]
Is a hippo a carnivore or herbivore? (herbivore)
Where do hippos spend most of their day? (in the water)
Why type of animal is a hippo? (mammal)
How fast can a hippo run? (up to 30 miles per hour)
How much grass (in pounds) will a hippo eat? (up to 150 pounds)
References:
Paula Anderson, Let's Sea How To Summarize
https://pea0002.wixsite.com/mysite/reading-to-learn
(first name not given) Blair, Growing Tall with Summarization
https://abb0036.wixsite.com/funwithreading/reading-to-learn
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00071k3
https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/hippopotamus/