Salsa into Summarization
By Madison Gillis
Rationale: In order to be a successful reader, you must read to comprehend and learn from what you have read. This lesson is designed to introduce students to the strategy of summarization. They will learn to pick out the main ideas of a story rather than picking out every little detail. By the use of summarization students will learn to delete information that is less important in a story and recall only the main ideas to better understand the deeper meaning. This lesson will guide students in eliminating unnecessary details of a passage and picking out the important details.
Materials:
Smart board
Poster with summarizing rules
Time for kids Tiger article (1 per kid)
Time for kids Butterfly article (1 per half the kids in the class)
Time for kids Puffin article (1 per half the kids in the class)
Highlighters (1 per kid)
Pencils (1 per kid)
Lined paper (1 per kid)
Procedures:
1. Say: How many of you have read a book so good that you wanted to tell your friend all about what you just read? (allow students to answer/raise hands) So have I! But we know that it is a little hard to tell our friends the ENTIRE story. That is why we use a little strategy called summarization to tell them about our story. Does anyone know what it means to give a summary of a story or passage? (allow children to answer) Okay, good guesses! Summarizing is when you tell someone only the important and meaningful things of a story instead of retelling the entire story. It will save you a good bit of time.
2. Say: There are a few rules to summarizing that are very important. First, it is important that you remove all the information that is not important. There are always going to be those small parts of a story that you can do without. Then you highlight the information that is important. What are the big parts of the story that you can’t leave out? Lastly, you write a topic sentence including all the important information. (provide poster with these 3 rules on it)
3. Say: We can summarize many things. We can summarize books, articles, stories or even events that happened real life. I am going to give you the chance to practice summarizing an article! (pass out tiger article from Time for kids, give students a few minutes to read article and understand it)
4. Say: Now that we have read the article, the first thing we need to do is look at our summarization rules. The first rule is to delete the unimportant information, meaning we throw out what we don’t need. We will go through the article and cross out what we don’t have to know. I'm going to read back through the article and see if there are any sentences that tell us things that are not important to our story. I'm going to use the SmartBoard, but you use your pencil to cross out any information that you do not think is very important to know from the article.
5. Say: Now that we have marked out the unimportant information, we look at step 2 on the rules chart, who can read rule number 2? (call on someone to read the rule) Rule number 2 is to highlight the important information. Since the unimportant information has already been crossed off, the important information will be easier to find, since it is what we are left with. (pass out highlighters to each student)
6. Say: Finally, our last rule is to make a topic sentence (point to the chart). This part can be a little tricky. What is a topic sentence? A topic sentence is a sentence that provides a short and clear description of what we have read. We do not want to include every detail, but we want to provide enough information that tells us what we read. Take a look at the important information we highlighted and come up with a topic sentence that gives us an idea of what our passage was about (walk around and give students assistance with this).
7. Say: Who wants to read their topic sentence for the class? (take a few volunteers/explain what they did right and wrong and show them how they can improve)
8. Say: Now I want everyone to get with a partner (allow students to pair up). I am going to give one of the people in your group an article about butterflies, and the other partner an article about a puffins. I want you to do exactly what we just did with the tiger article, following the steps of summarization on the board (pass out articles) Try and remember what we talked about, and don’t be afraid to raise your hand if you need extra help!
9. Say: Make sure to really focus on your topic sentence. We want this to be the best part of our summarization, because this is what shows readers what they are about to learn more about.
References:
Surfing into Spectacular Summarization by Delaney O’Brien https://piggybug10.wixsite.com/delaney/reading-to-learn
Hope for Tigers https://www.timeforkids.com/g2/hope-for-tigers-3/
Team Puffins https://www.timeforkids.com/g2/team-puffins/
Species at Risk https://www.timeforkids.com/g2/species-at-risk-3/
