Reading to Learn Design

Diving with Dolphins into Summarization

Rationale:

The goal of reading is for students to achieve reading comprehension. 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 summarize. Summarization is one of the most powerful strategies for comprehending text. 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. Basically, summarization is where you find an umbrella term for the events that happen in the text. 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:

Paper
Pencil
Highlighter
Summarization checklists (see below)
Comprehension quiz (see below)
Copy of article about dolphins with a video (show video on screen) (see below)
Bookmark with summarization rules

Procedures:

1. Say: “Today we are going to learn how to summarize! Summarizing is picking out the most important parts and information of a book, article, or story and explaining it to someone. When we read a text, we could spend all day trying to remember all the words and details of that text. Good readers do not try to remember every little detail that they read. Instead, they use summarization strategies to remember only the important points the author is making about the topic. Today we are going to learn and practice three steps that will help us remember the important information we need to understand the text.”

2. Say: “Before we start reading, I am going to pass around a bookmark that shares the four secrets to summarization on it. Let’s read the four secrets together!”

1) Delete unimportant information, can anyone tell me how they know what information would be unimportant? Right! It is information that doesn’t pertain to the main idea.

2) Highlight important information

3) Ignore small details

4) Superordinate and form a topic sentence. Make sure you keep track of your bookmark because these secrets are key to good summarization.

3. Say: “The article that we are going to read today is all about dolphins. Has anyone ever seen a dolphin? Have you ridden of the back of a dolphin? (wait for responses) Let’s watch a video about dolphins! (show video) So what did everyone think of the beautiful dolphins? (wait for responses) Well today we are going to learn all about them and what makes them so cool! (pass out article to each student) As you are reading, remember to pay attention to the secrets to summarization on your bookmarks! After you finish reading the whole article, I want you to write a one or two sentence summary of this article. Should our summary be longer than the article itself? (wait for responses) No, it should not!”

4. After students finish reading and writing their summaries say: “Class, I am going to read a paragraph of article out loud. We are then going to try to figure out the most important part of the paragraph and create a few summary sentences. Are you ready?”

5. Say: “Now that we have read one paragraph of this article, I want you to finish the article on your own. Then we will talk about the most important parts of this article. Once we discuss some important parts of this article, we will use the summaries we created to write a topic sentence. We need to ask ourselves a few questions like: What is this article about? What is the main idea of this article? What does the author of this article want me to know about dolphins?”

6. Say: “Now what do we do if there is a word that we do not understand in the text? For example, in our article, the word “vocalizations” catches my eye. I may not know exactly what this word means. So, I would ask myself: What do I think this word means? Does it have something to do with an animally vocally? What does this word have to do with dolphins? Our next step is to look up the word in the dictionary. This helps me figure out the meaning of the word. Vocalization is the act or process of producing sounds with a voice or sound. Dolphins use vocalization to communicate with each other. Now it is time to use this word in a sentence. This is the sentence I want each of you to complete: Dolphins have several ____ that they use to communicate, such as clicks, whistles, and squeals (vocalizations). Now, I want each of you to write a sentence using this word correctly. (I will walk around the room and check their sentences to see if they used the word correctly) Can anyone give me an example? Great! It is important to recognize that this word is a crucial piece of the article and that it would not make as much sense without it. I need everyone to reread the article and try to come up with a topic sentence.” (I will walk around the room and see how everyone is doing)

7. Say: “Everyone’s writing is looking awesome! Remember to pick out important details from the article to back up our main idea! Once we finish, everyone should have the correct information to write a summary.”

8. Say: “When everyone has completed this task, please bring me your summaries.”

9. Once I have received everyone’s summaries, I will check over them and review their work. (see summary checklist below) After the assessment regarding their summaries, I will then ask students to answer a few questions about the text. This will allow me to check their comprehension and understanding of the text. (see below)

Summary Checklist for students:

___ I have written a topic sentence

___ I have found/ highlighting supporting details to help answer the question

___ I removed unimportant information by crossing it out

___ I removed repeated ideas

___ I created a 3-5 sentence summary

Summary Checklist for teacher to evaluate about the students:

___ Did the student pick out the most important information?

___ Did the student delete unnecessary information?

___ Did the student fully understand the information in the article?

___ Did the student write a strong topic sentence?

___ Did the student write strong sentences summarizing the important parts of the text?

Comprehension Questions

How many dolphin species are there?
What do dolphins like to eat? How do they eat it?
Dolphins are ______ mammals?
What is the largest dolphin?
What is the most endangered Dolphin? How many of these are left?

References:

Summarizing with Seals and Sea Lions: https://sydneyfaith1.wixsite.com/my-site/reading-to-learn

Article with video: https://us.whales.org/whales-dolphins/facts-about-dolphins/