To Summarize is Simple as Pie

Reading to Learn

Clarice Smith

Rationale

The main point in learning to read is to be able to get something from the reading. Once children have gained the ability to read fluently, the next step is to make sure they are gaining the knowledge from the text. A good way to demonstrate this is through summarization. By modeling how to find the most important information, students understand the goal of reading is to find the main ideas. Summarization requires the students to retain the most important parts from a text and leave out the information that is trivial. To assess how well the student summarizes, there will be a chart the teacher will use to identify what parts of summarization the students understood.

Materials

Paper
Pencils
Set of Green Sea Turtles articles
Set of Secret Language of Dolphins articles
Summarization Checklist

Procedures

"Today we are going to be learning how to summarize. Summarizing is finding the main ideas of something that you read. This skill is extremely important because it helps us as readers to find the most important information about what we are reading. In order to find the most important information to put in a summary, we need to find and delete any information that isn't important. Today we are going to practice finding the main idea, finding important details that support that idea, and removing any unimportant or unnecessary information.
“Let’s start by talking about the three steps to summarizing.” Write these down, if necessary, on chalkboard, whiteboard, or smartboard; write them somewhere the students can see.

“The first step is to identify all of the important details. Figure out what the main idea is and underline it so you can find it later.”
“Next, we’re going to mark out anything that aren’t important or have been said more than once.”
“And finally, we need to find a way to organize our important information, including any details that support our main ideas.”

“Now, let’s talk about the important things about summarizing. Summaries should be shorter than the passage we read first, usually three to five sentences, a good paragraph. The summary paragraph should start with a topic sentence that tells you the main idea of the entire passage.”
“Next, I’m going to pass out our first article to read. It’s about the green sea turtle. Before we read, I’m going to point out a few important vocabulary words. The first is migrate. To migrate means to leave your home and settle in a new area. Many animals do this when the seasons change, like when the birds fly south for winter. Another is poaching. This means that humans go and hunt these animals illegally because they are threatened or endangered in the wild.” Pass out copies of the article to each student.
Read the article out loud as the students follow along on their own copy.
“Now, I’m going to show you how I would summarize this article.

To start, I’m going to pick out the most important details. The one thing I noticed was that it talked a lot about where turtles spend their time. So, I’m going to make my topic sentence. ‘Green sea turtles live the majority of their lives in the water.’” Write the sentence down on the board.
“Next, let’s see what information is not important to this idea. The sentence ‘When active, they typically alternate between being underwater for a few minutes and coming up to the surface to breathe air for a few seconds.’
“Now that we have our main idea, we need to work out what the author is trying to say about this topic.” Write down key topics on the board to show them.

Continue going through steps, thinking aloud so the students understand the process of deciding what is and is not important to the summary.
Pass out the next article and say, “It’s your turn this time. Read the article to yourself and do our three steps to make a summary. Remember the important things about summaries.” They will read the article and write their own summaries to turn in at the end.

Assessment

Ask them comprehension questions after they have turned in the summaries. Go over their independent summaries of the article using the chart. All or mostly yes’s means that the student has a strong understanding of summarization. Work on any areas that were given a no.

Questions: