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Shaking Up Summarizations

Rationale: Summarization is an important comprehension strategy for students to be able to understand all of the new information they take in when reading. An effective summarization strategy is called about-point. When using this method, two questions should be asked: 1) What is the text about? Usually, this is an easy question that helps identify the topic sentence. 2) What is the main point that the writer is making about the topic? This question can be a little more challenging. Often, several points are made; the reader must decide on the overall most important message of the text. The main point will become the predicate of the topic sentence.

Materials

1.National Geographic Article: Earthquake 

2.Highlighters for each child

3. Marker

4. Paper

5. Pencil

6. Poster with summarization steps

7. Print out of the demonstration paragraph 



Procedure:
1. Today we are going to learn how to summarize an article! This is a great tool to have when learning. "When summarizing a text, you create a shorter version of what you read. This helps the you, the reader, actually comprehend the material. For example, if I read a passage such as ‘The dog ran away from home. We could not find him. After a day he came back happier than ever!’ I could summarize the passage by saying ‘Our dog ran away but he came back!’ Did you see how I took out the extra words to make one short sentence. I only kept the main ideas. Which was that our dog ran away but he came back. I didn’t need to add the extra details that we couldn’t find him because we eventually did! Today we are going to be summarizing just like I just did. We will focus on what the main idea is, what facts support the main idea, and what information we can take away. 


2. [Hang summarization poster on board & review summarization steps.] Say: “When we summarize we are going to do three things:1st: Cross out any unimportant or repeated information (or fluff) that isn’t essential to the message of the text. 2nd: Find and highlight the important information that is essential to the text. 3rd: Form a topic sentence from the important information you highlighted.”




3. I will have students title a piece of paper with their name and have an article on earthquakes printed out. "I want everyone to read the text silently on your own. Be thinking about some of the important points in the story and jot down some points on a piece of paper. Also jot down some vocab words that you do not understand."


4. Say Booktalk “Have you ever felt the earth shake? Well if you have this is called an earthquake. What makes the earth do this? Well let’s read this article and find out!”


5. Once the children have finished reading the assigned article and making notes about the main points. "We are now going to summarize what we just read. On the copy of the text I just gave you, the first step in summarization is picking out the most important details and underlining or highlighting them. Use your points that you jotted down to help you." After the students do this, we will then discuss each of these facts as a class." After you highlight the main points, I want you to take your marker and mark through all of the information you don't feel is important." Summaries should always be shorter in length than the original article. 


6. "Next we will go through the text and choose out what was critical and what is not, I want you to write the highlighted information. Make sure you leave out all the words you marked out with the pen." Have the students create the summarization like you showed them earlier in the session.


7. Once everyone is done have some students read their summaries to the class. Have the students to listen and ask them “Does their summary sound similar to the ones being read?”  


8. Say: Geologist is a good vocabulary word for us to take a closer look at. We are going to use Geologist as our example vocabulary word, so that you learn how to use context clues when defining unknown words in the future. I can tell from the paragraph that it must be a person/scientist. Geologist study the earth and its physical properties. What would be an example of something that a Geologist would study? Why do you think Geologists are important?


Assessment: To evaluate the children’s summarization abilities, the children will be able to choose an article to read quietly and will summarize that article with 3 to 5 sentences independently. Teacher will make sure they included the main ideas of the story and left out information that is irrelevant. This will demonstrate an understanding of summarization.

Summarization Assessment Checklist: Gather all the students’ summaries of the article and evaluate their summaries using the following checklist:

            _____ Student collected important information for their main point.

            _____ Student ignored examples and minute details throughout the summary.

            _____ Students meaningfully reduced the text from the original article.

            _____ Students created sentences that incorporated ideas together from each paragraph.  

            _____ Students created sentences that were organized logically into essay form.

Comprehension Quiz:

1.     Do plates move really fast?

2.     What happens when a plate moves/scrapes/shifts?

3.     Are there a lot of earthquakes?

4.     What type of events can happen from earthquakes?

5.     Can Geologist predict earthquakes?


References:


·       Article: https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/explore/science/earthquake/

·       Bruce Murray: Reading to learn Design (RL)

·       Charlie Marks: https://charliemarks1.wixsite.com/mysite-2/reading-to-learn

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