Reading to Learn Design
Emily Griffin, CTRD 3000
Rationale:
The overall goal of good reading is achieving reading comprehension. Reading comprehension is the ability to understand the message of a text that was just read. If a student is reading for comprehension, they do not have to spend time decoding words. They can focus on understanding the message of the text they are reading! A great way to test a student’s comprehension is to have them summarize a book or passage that they have read. In this lesson, students will practice summarization as a strategy to enhance reading comprehension. The students will summarize texts by pulling out important information from the text. Students will use the following summarization rules: mark out information that is not important or repeated, find and highlight important information, superordinate predicate terms, and describe the passage in a few sentences. For each paragraph students will mark out trivial information, find an umbrella term(s), and summarize with one topic sentence. The teacher will model how to detect important information that is needed to write a summary.
Materials:
Procedures:
1. Say “Raise your hand if you have ever read an article or a book and then recommended it to a friend! Did you read them the whole thing, or did you just tell them about the most important parts? Right! When we are telling someone about a book or article, we only tell them about the most important parts of the story. This strategy is called summarizing, and it helps us to study, communicate, and learn every day. Summarization is a very important strategy that skilled readers use to help them comprehend what they have read. If you are able to summarize a book, then it is a sign that you understand what you have read!”
2. Say: “Three rules that can help us remember how to summarize are: (students will copy the rules for later use in their daily notebooks)
3. Say “Before we begin, I want to talk about some important words that we will see in the text that we are going to read. These words are: mammal and climate. The first word we are going to review is mammal, which means to be in a class of living things which consists of a warm-blooded vertebrate typically with hair or fur. Here are some example sentences about mammals!
The second word is climate. A climate is the weather conditions within a region that remain constant over a long period of time. For example, what would you expect the climate in the Arctic to be like? (Wait for students to answer). We might expect a very cold climate with lots of ice and snow! Here are some examples of times where we might use the word climate:
Later in the lesson today we will be talking about how changes in the climate can make it harder for animals to hunt and survive. Now I want you to use "climate" in a sentence about the desert.”
4. Say “When we want to summarize a passage, we read only a little bit at a time. When we finish reading that small part, we look back and figure out what the most important parts are. We cross out ideas that are not important to the main idea. We must be very selective in choosing the most important information. Now that we know what summarization is and why it is important, I am going to show you how to do it. To do this, we will use an article called “The Giant Panda”.
Book talk: This article gives us a ton of information about why the giant panda is such a special animal! This article will tell us lots of facts about the giant panda, including its weight, where it lives, and what it likes to eat. Let’s read to find out more about the giant panda! (Hand each student a copy of the article). Watch how I summarize the first paragraph in the article. Remember that I only want to keep the most important parts! First, I am going to read the entire first paragraph.
“High in dense bamboo forests in the misty, rainy mountains of southwestern China lives one of the world's rarest mammals: the giant panda, also called the panda. Only about 1,500 of these black-and-white relatives of bears survive in the wild.”
The first paragraph gives us some great information! I am going to use a highlighter to highlight the important parts. The first paragraph tells us all about where the giant panda lives. I am going to highlight the words “bamboo forests,” “southwestern China,” “rarest mammals” because these are some of the basic facts we need to know about pandas. I will cross out all of the unnecessary details that are leftover in this paragraph. For example, because we already know that the panda is rare, we can cross out the second sentence about exactly how many giant pandas live in the wild.
Since this paragraph talks about two main things about panda bears, let’s figure out what they are! These will help us decide what our umbrella terms should be. Who can think of one? (Wait for class to answer.) “Where pandas live and how rare they are! Good job! This paragraph tells us exactly where in the world we would expect to see a giant panda in the wild and tells us about how likely it would that we would see one. Since it says giant pandas are very rare, we would probably not spot one in the wild. Our summarized topic sentence for this paragraph can be “Giant pandas live in the bamboo forests in southwestern China and are very rare.”
5. Say, “Now that you have a good idea of how to summarize, let’s summarize the next paragraph together.
“Pandas eat almost nothing but bamboo shoots and leaves. Occasionally they eat other vegetation, fish, or small animals, but bamboo accounts for 99 percent of their diets. Pandas eat fast, they eat a lot, and they spend about 12 hours a day doing it. The reason: They digest only about a fifth of what they eat. Overall, bamboo is not very nutritious. To stay healthy, they have to eat a lot—up to 15 percent of their body weight in 12 hours—so they eat fast.”
6. Say: Let’s underline the most important parts of this paragraph. “Do you think that the sentence about the vegetation, fish, and small animals that pandas eat is important?” (Listen to the answers the students give). “No, I don’t think it is either, because our paragraph already told us that pandas eat almost nothing but bamboo.” (Allow students time to discuss with their partners what they believe the important parts are). Continue with this activity until the class has helped the you form a clear and concise topic sentence by following the correct steps listen in procedure number two.
7. “Now that I have modeled for you and we have done it together, you are going to practice summarizing on your own. I want you to read the article “Polar Bear” in National Geographic Kids. Once you have finished, come to the front and get a Summary Checklist from me. This will help you write a summary of the article using the highlighted information. Do not worry if it looks short! The point of a summary is so that you get a shortest version of an article. Once you have finished, I want you to share your summary with a neighbor. If there are any differences between you and your neighbor’s summaries, I want you to discuss them.”
Summary Checklist:
Did I…..
____ Write a topic sentence for each paragraph?
____ Did I remove unimportant information and repeated ideas by crossing them out? Did I highlight the most important information?
____ Did I come up with an umbrella term or terms before I wrote each topic sentence?
____ Is my summary for the passage about 3-5 sentences? About one sentence for each paragraph.
Assessment Materials:
Comprehension Questions:
Name: _____________
1. What was the primary food for the polar bear? (Answer: seals)
2. What is making it harder for polar bears to hunt? (Answer: climate change—talk about what this means with your class when you are going over the answers.)
3. What do the polar bear’s large front paws help them do? (Answer: swim)
4. What did the agreement that the U.S., Canada, Denmark, Norway, and Russia signed in 1973 say? (Answer: They will protect polar bears.)
Assessment Checklist:
This student…
_____Collected important information
_____ Significantly reduced the text from the original
_____ Wrote sentences that brought ideas together from each paragraph
_____ Wrote sentences that were organized coherently into essay form
References:
Giant Panda; National Geographic for Kids: https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/animals/giant-panda/#
Polar Bear; National Geographic for Kids:
https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/animals/polar-bear/#polar-bear-mom-cub.jpg
Bailey Black; Bailey Black’s Lesson Designs; How Whale Can You Read?: https://beb0036.wixsite.com/mysite/reading-to-learn
Erin Korn; Reading with Ms. Korn; Summarization Superstars:
https://erinkorn29.wixsite.com/mysite/reading-to-learn
Emily Griffin: [email protected]
The overall goal of good reading is achieving reading comprehension. Reading comprehension is the ability to understand the message of a text that was just read. If a student is reading for comprehension, they do not have to spend time decoding words. They can focus on understanding the message of the text they are reading! A great way to test a student’s comprehension is to have them summarize a book or passage that they have read. In this lesson, students will practice summarization as a strategy to enhance reading comprehension. The students will summarize texts by pulling out important information from the text. Students will use the following summarization rules: mark out information that is not important or repeated, find and highlight important information, superordinate predicate terms, and describe the passage in a few sentences. For each paragraph students will mark out trivial information, find an umbrella term(s), and summarize with one topic sentence. The teacher will model how to detect important information that is needed to write a summary.
Materials:
- Paper and pencil for each student
- Highlighters for each student
- Daily Journals for notes
- Individual copies of the article “Giant Panda” by National Geographic Kids
- Individual copies of the article “Polar Bear” by National Geographic Kids
- Summarization checklist
- Assessment checklist
- Comprehension questions
Procedures:
1. Say “Raise your hand if you have ever read an article or a book and then recommended it to a friend! Did you read them the whole thing, or did you just tell them about the most important parts? Right! When we are telling someone about a book or article, we only tell them about the most important parts of the story. This strategy is called summarizing, and it helps us to study, communicate, and learn every day. Summarization is a very important strategy that skilled readers use to help them comprehend what they have read. If you are able to summarize a book, then it is a sign that you understand what you have read!”
2. Say: “Three rules that can help us remember how to summarize are: (students will copy the rules for later use in their daily notebooks)
- Cross out any unimportant or repeated information that isn’t essential to the message of the text. Find and highlight the important information that is essential to the text.
- Superordinate items and events. This means to find an umbrella term or terms for the events that happen in the text.
- Form a topic sentence from your umbrella terms and the important information you highlighted.
3. Say “Before we begin, I want to talk about some important words that we will see in the text that we are going to read. These words are: mammal and climate. The first word we are going to review is mammal, which means to be in a class of living things which consists of a warm-blooded vertebrate typically with hair or fur. Here are some example sentences about mammals!
- Mammals are born live, not in eggs.
- Humans, dogs, horses, whales, elephants, and many other animals are kinds of mammals.
- Most mammals have teeth—except for the anteater!
- Mammals live in all sorts of environments, including on land, in the ocean, and even underground.
The second word is climate. A climate is the weather conditions within a region that remain constant over a long period of time. For example, what would you expect the climate in the Arctic to be like? (Wait for students to answer). We might expect a very cold climate with lots of ice and snow! Here are some examples of times where we might use the word climate:
- Tropical climates are hot and have lots of precipitation.
- You house must keep out rain, snow, and wind to keep a warm, and dry climate inside.
- Rice grows in warm climates.
- A climate of fear prevails in the city. This sentence is different than the others! It is still talking about a general atmosphere or stable condition over a period of time, but in this sentence, it is not talking about the weather.
Later in the lesson today we will be talking about how changes in the climate can make it harder for animals to hunt and survive. Now I want you to use "climate" in a sentence about the desert.”
4. Say “When we want to summarize a passage, we read only a little bit at a time. When we finish reading that small part, we look back and figure out what the most important parts are. We cross out ideas that are not important to the main idea. We must be very selective in choosing the most important information. Now that we know what summarization is and why it is important, I am going to show you how to do it. To do this, we will use an article called “The Giant Panda”.
Book talk: This article gives us a ton of information about why the giant panda is such a special animal! This article will tell us lots of facts about the giant panda, including its weight, where it lives, and what it likes to eat. Let’s read to find out more about the giant panda! (Hand each student a copy of the article). Watch how I summarize the first paragraph in the article. Remember that I only want to keep the most important parts! First, I am going to read the entire first paragraph.
“High in dense bamboo forests in the misty, rainy mountains of southwestern China lives one of the world's rarest mammals: the giant panda, also called the panda. Only about 1,500 of these black-and-white relatives of bears survive in the wild.”
The first paragraph gives us some great information! I am going to use a highlighter to highlight the important parts. The first paragraph tells us all about where the giant panda lives. I am going to highlight the words “bamboo forests,” “southwestern China,” “rarest mammals” because these are some of the basic facts we need to know about pandas. I will cross out all of the unnecessary details that are leftover in this paragraph. For example, because we already know that the panda is rare, we can cross out the second sentence about exactly how many giant pandas live in the wild.
Since this paragraph talks about two main things about panda bears, let’s figure out what they are! These will help us decide what our umbrella terms should be. Who can think of one? (Wait for class to answer.) “Where pandas live and how rare they are! Good job! This paragraph tells us exactly where in the world we would expect to see a giant panda in the wild and tells us about how likely it would that we would see one. Since it says giant pandas are very rare, we would probably not spot one in the wild. Our summarized topic sentence for this paragraph can be “Giant pandas live in the bamboo forests in southwestern China and are very rare.”
5. Say, “Now that you have a good idea of how to summarize, let’s summarize the next paragraph together.
“Pandas eat almost nothing but bamboo shoots and leaves. Occasionally they eat other vegetation, fish, or small animals, but bamboo accounts for 99 percent of their diets. Pandas eat fast, they eat a lot, and they spend about 12 hours a day doing it. The reason: They digest only about a fifth of what they eat. Overall, bamboo is not very nutritious. To stay healthy, they have to eat a lot—up to 15 percent of their body weight in 12 hours—so they eat fast.”
6. Say: Let’s underline the most important parts of this paragraph. “Do you think that the sentence about the vegetation, fish, and small animals that pandas eat is important?” (Listen to the answers the students give). “No, I don’t think it is either, because our paragraph already told us that pandas eat almost nothing but bamboo.” (Allow students time to discuss with their partners what they believe the important parts are). Continue with this activity until the class has helped the you form a clear and concise topic sentence by following the correct steps listen in procedure number two.
7. “Now that I have modeled for you and we have done it together, you are going to practice summarizing on your own. I want you to read the article “Polar Bear” in National Geographic Kids. Once you have finished, come to the front and get a Summary Checklist from me. This will help you write a summary of the article using the highlighted information. Do not worry if it looks short! The point of a summary is so that you get a shortest version of an article. Once you have finished, I want you to share your summary with a neighbor. If there are any differences between you and your neighbor’s summaries, I want you to discuss them.”
Summary Checklist:
Did I…..
____ Write a topic sentence for each paragraph?
____ Did I remove unimportant information and repeated ideas by crossing them out? Did I highlight the most important information?
____ Did I come up with an umbrella term or terms before I wrote each topic sentence?
____ Is my summary for the passage about 3-5 sentences? About one sentence for each paragraph.
Assessment Materials:
Comprehension Questions:
Name: _____________
1. What was the primary food for the polar bear? (Answer: seals)
2. What is making it harder for polar bears to hunt? (Answer: climate change—talk about what this means with your class when you are going over the answers.)
3. What do the polar bear’s large front paws help them do? (Answer: swim)
4. What did the agreement that the U.S., Canada, Denmark, Norway, and Russia signed in 1973 say? (Answer: They will protect polar bears.)
Assessment Checklist:
This student…
_____Collected important information
_____ Significantly reduced the text from the original
_____ Wrote sentences that brought ideas together from each paragraph
_____ Wrote sentences that were organized coherently into essay form
References:
Giant Panda; National Geographic for Kids: https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/animals/giant-panda/#
Polar Bear; National Geographic for Kids:
https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/animals/polar-bear/#polar-bear-mom-cub.jpg
Bailey Black; Bailey Black’s Lesson Designs; How Whale Can You Read?: https://beb0036.wixsite.com/mysite/reading-to-learn
Erin Korn; Reading with Ms. Korn; Summarization Superstars:
https://erinkorn29.wixsite.com/mysite/reading-to-learn
Emily Griffin: [email protected]