Swimming into Summarization
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Rationale:
It is so important that you learn how to read. While you read you must also learn how to comprehend what you are reading. It is also important that you learn to summarize so you can be a successful reader. To summarize is to take all of the important details and main ideas out of a text and combine them in a way that explains the story. 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. White board- Rules written on the white board:
1. take out minor details
2. find an umbrella term for the events that happen in the text
3. write a sentence that tells what the text is about
2. Paper
3. Pencils
4. class copies of bottlenose dolphin article
Procedures:
1. Say: “Raise your hand if you have ever read a book that you thought was so interesting that you wanted to tell someone about it. When you told them did you tell them only the important parts of the book? If so, that is called summarization.”
2. Say: “Now that you all are becoming fluent readers, we need to learn a new skill to help with reading comprehension. The strategy we are going to be working on is summarization. Summarization, like mentioned before, is understanding the main ideas in a text. It helps us look at the important facts, rather than the whole text. We are going to look at an article so that we understand the main points of the article. As we summarize we are going to be focusing on the main idea, looking at facts that support this idea, and what information we can take out.”
3. Say: “In order to successfully summarize, we must understand these three rules. (Point to rules written on the white board and have students copy down). Rule one, mark out any unnecessary or repeated information. Can anyone tell me how they know what unnecessary information would be? Right! It is information that doesn’t pertain to the main idea. Rule two, find an umbrella term for the events that happen in the text. The last rule is to form a sentence to represent the main idea from what you highlighted.”
4. Say: “Now that we know our key strategies for helping us summarize we can begin to look at an article to practice summarizing. I am going to show you how I would do these steps of summarization with a short article about bottle nose dolphins that we are reading today!” (Book talk: How many of you have ever been to the beach and seen a dolphin? Dolphins are some of the smartest animals on earth. What are some cool things that you think dolphins can do? Did you know that they are pros at signaling messages to their friends. We are going to read just how exciting these amazing creatures are).
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. We are going to go over a few words together that you will see in the article that we are going to read today. For each word please make sure you right the word, its definition, and the sentence used. [for each word explain the word in simple language, model how to use the word” (what doesn’t it mean?), provide sample questions using the word, and scaffold by making a sentence using the word for students to complete.] For example, “let’s look at the first vocabulary word, echolocation. Echolocation is what tells the dolphins the shape, size, speed, distance, and location of the object. The word is used in the passage, “Dolphins also produce high frequency clicks, which act as a sonar system called echolocation.” Now that we know what echolocation means, can you see how it fits into the sentence? Why do you think echolocation is important?” (repeat modeling process for the remaining vocabulary words). Vocabulary words: echolocation, mammals,
6. Say: “As I pass out to you the articles we are going to summarize today, take another look out our summarization rules that are on the board and make sure they are copied down correctly.” Once everything is passed out and the students have everything copied down, begin the lesson.
7. Say: “Who can tell me, based off of the rules, what they think we should do first if we want to summarize this article? Right! Highlight the most important information. Let’s take a look at the first paragraph and see if we can start the process of summarization. We first highlight all important sentences. Once we highlight the important sentences, we can go back and mark the ones that were not as important.” (Explain why you highlighted and marked out certain sentences when modeling the paragraph below).
Thought to be some of the smartest animals on Earth, bottlenose dolphins send messages to one another in many different ways. They squeak, squawk and use body language—leaping as high as 20 feet in the air, snapping their jaws, slapping their tails on the surface of the water, blowing bubbles and even butting heads. Each dolphin has a special whistle that it creates soon after it is born. This whistle is used for identification, just like a human’s name. Dolphins also produce high frequency clicks, which act as a sonar system called echolocation (ek-oh-low-KAY-shun). When the clicking sounds hit an object in the water, like a fish or rock, they bounce off and come back to the dolphin as echoes. Echolocation tells the dolphins the shape, size, speed, distance, and location of the object.
1. Say: “Now all of your articles should look like mine. Now that we have everything highlighted and crossed out, we are going to form a topic sentence based off of our highlighted information.” (Write sentence on board for students to refer back to) “Dolphins send messages to one another through whistles, which is also a way they identify themselves.”
2. Say: “We are going to continue this process for each paragraph of this article. Now that we have practiced this together I want you to continue to work individually on this task. I want you to pick out some important facts and highlight them and cross out anything that is not as important. Once you are done and have found the most important facts in each paragraph, you can start to put all the sentences together to make your own one, big paragraph. This paragraph is your summary!
3. As students finish, have them turn in their article and summary for a grade. Tell them to pick up a comprehension question exit slip that they will fill out as well. The exit slip will consist of the following questions: 1. What are the dolphin’s whistles used for? 2. How fast can dolphins swim? 3. Where are bottle nose dolphins found? 4. Why is echolocation important for dolphins? 5. What do you think the author intended the purpose of the article to be? Have students turn in their annotated article and a summary and grade as form of assessment. The rubric used:
Summary rubric:
_____ Student underlined/highlighted important ideas
_____ Student crossed out unimportant detail
_____ Summary used 1+ complete sentences in their summary
_____ Student identified topics accurately in summary
_____ Student included key ideas in summary
Resources:
Article: https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/animals/bottlenose-dolphin/#world-oceans-day-dolphins.jpg
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Emmy Wilson, Swimming in the Sea with Summarization: 2https://epw0010.wixsite.com/ctrd/copy-of-growing-independance-and-fl
Ashley Kirkland, Swimming into summarization
Olivia James, Building a bridge to summarization
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