Rationale: After becoming a fluent reader, and moving on to more lengthy and challenging texts, it is important to develop summarization skills. It is also important for students to be able to differentiate between important and unimportant information when reading, so that they can recall the main ideas of a passage. When a student is able to summarize a text, they capture the meaning of the article.  This demonstrates their comprehension strategies and is important for maturing readers. This lesson will teach students how to pick out the important information in a long text, summarize the text, and then demonstrate their understanding of the whole text. 

 

Materials:

• White board and dry erase markers

• Smart board

• Yellow and blue highlighters

• Pencils

• Handouts: Discovery Kids articles:

  • Are Jellyfish Really Fish?

  • Survive a Shark Attack

• Summarization Checklist:

  • ___ I have written my topic sentence

  • ___ I have found supporting details to help answer the question

  • ___ I have removed unimportant, repeating information by crossing them out

  • ___ I have found an umbrella term for the events that happen in the paragraph

  • ___ I have written a 3-5 sentence summary

 

Procedures:

1. Say: “Today we are going to be talking about summarizing. Does anyone know what summarizing means? It means to find the main ideas in the text you are reading. This is when you look at an entire passage you have read and shrink it down to specific information or key events that have the most meaning in the story. We must use summarization so that we can comprehend what is happening in the story. To comprehend means to better understand the story. We will practice summarizing with two different articles by focusing on finding the main ideas, facts that support them, and information that can be removed.”

2. Say: “First we need to learn the rules on how to summarize. I need a couple helpers to come write the rules on the white board. I am going to leave this on the board as we work today so that it will help you as you read the articles to help you summarize.

   1. “Here are our three summarization tips:

      1. Tip 1: Pick out the most important details by underlining or highlighting them

      2. Tip 2: Find the repeated details that are unimportant and cross them out

      3. Tip 3: Find umbrella terms for the events that happen in the paragraph.

      4. Tip 4: Organize the information you found in tip 1 by writing sentences about them. “

3. Say: “Now that we understand how summarization works, I am going to pass out a ‘Summarization Checklist.’ This piece of paper has all of the steps listed in order to help me summarize while I read. It is important to find the main idea of a passage to know what the summary is going to be about. The first step in doing that is reading the passage and then writing a topic sentence. Next, go through and find supporting, or helpful, details, as well as marking through the unimportant or repeated details. Then you are able to write your summary. Remember a summary is a brief overview, so it needs to stay short and make sure to use your words and not just coping the passage word for word.”

4. Hand out copies of Are Jellyfish Really Fish

5. Say: “I am handing out an article titled, Are Jellyfish Really Fish? Does anyone have a guess what jellyfish might be? Before we read to find out, let’s go over some of the vocabulary words that we need to know in order to understand the article.

The first word is “orient.” Does anyone know what orient means? Great job! Orient means to direct or position toward a particular object. The sentence containing this words says: To see light, detect smells and orient themselves, they have rudimentary sensory nerves at the base of their tentacles. So this sentence teaches us that the jellyfish use their sensory nerves to see light, smell, and know where they are. Orient does not mean blind to all surrounding things. Help me finish the sentence: When building my new house, I will orient _____. Now that we know some key words, let’s find out if jellyfish are fish or not.

Other words to be taught: defense, diameter, predators, transparent

1. Read Article aloud to the class. Then use the smart board to project the article on the screen.

2. Say: So now that we know that jellyfish aren’t really fish, let’s think about how we would summarize this passage:

“Some jellyfish, such as sea nettles, make their own light. They glow or give off flashes of light in the same way that fireflies do. This is known as bioluminescence. Some jellyfish use this light to attract prey. But most jellyfish use it as a defense against predators. Lighted up, a small jellyfish with long tentacles suddenly looks like a large animal. They aren’t actually fish; they’re plankton. Jellyfish have no bones, brain, or heart. To see light, detect smells and orient themselves, they have rudimentary sensory nerves at the base of their tentacles.”

1. Let’s start with an easy question… what is this article talking about? Right! Jellyfish! Since we know that jellyfish is the main idea, let’s highlight it yellow because it is important. Now let’s look for some other important details that show us how jellyfish aren’t fish. In the second paragraph, what are some important things to highlight? Good, jellyfish. Let’s look at the action verbs after the noun jellyfish, and highlight those in blue. These verbs give us a lot of information such as the light is what helps jellyfish catch and warn off predators. Also, because the article says that jellyfish do not have a brain, bones, or heart, then they must not be fish! Let’s reread the paragraph and cross out everything that is not important with our pencil. These include all of the sentences that are descriptions and extra information that take away from the main point of the article. We can cross out the first, second, third, forth, and the fifth because they do not give us any hints on if jellyfish are fish or not. In sentence 6, it compares fish to animals and then in sentence 7, it says right of the bat that jellyfish are not fish. So both of these sentences are crucial to explain that jellyfish aren’t fish. Just from this paragraph alone, we found out that jellyfish are plankton, they don’t have a heart, brain, or bones, they get confused with fish because of their similar qualities such as tentacles, and they use their senses and nerves to find what is around them. See how easy that was! You can summarize! Now, try and finish off the article on your own. 

2. After all students finish summarizing the article, tell them the last thing we need to do is look for a topic sentence.

3. Say: “Now that we have all of our important information left, let’s come up with a topic sentence. It needs to include the main idea that we have learned: Jellyfish aren’t fish, they are plankton. My topic sentence could be: ‘Jellyfish are not fish, they are plankton.’ Finish writing the summary as a class, and then go through the summary checklist to make sure you covered everything.

4. Pass out Survive a Shark Attack article. Say: “Now that we have practiced summarizing together, it is your turn to do it on your own! This article is about what to do if you are in a shark attack. Does anyone have an idea? Well to find out what the best thing to do is, we are going to read the article. Remember to look back at the tips on the board, as well as the checklist on your desk.

 

Assessment:

To assess students learning in the process of summarization, I will collect their copies of Survive a Shark Attack and examine to see if they have highlighted and crossed out the right details. I will then read over their summaries and see if they covered the main idea. Also ask the students these following comprehension questions to see if they gathered knowledge from the article: What is the best thing to do if a shark is nearing you in the ocean? What is not the best thing to do to avoid a shark attack? Where did this testing of the theory take place? Was the theory correct or false? This is the rubric I will be grading their summaries on:

            Rubric:

            (yes or no)

1. Construct a simple, topic sentence to answer the question?

2. Delete/cross out unimportant, repeated information

3. Include supporting details to prove their point?

4. Organize summary with a big idea?

 

References:

 

Sarah Price, Diving into Summarization

 

Claire Koenig, Ready, Set, Summarize!

 

Are Jellyfish Really Fish?

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Survive a Shark Attack

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