Summarizing is Easy as Pie!
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Rationale: After readers learn to read fluently and correctly, the next step to learn is comprehension. They must learn how to read to learn. This is accomplished by distinguishing the difference between important information in the text from the information that is less significant. The point of this lesson is to teach students to summarize, an essential skill in reading comprehension. Summarization includes the skill of superordination or finding an umbrella term for the events that happen in the text. This lesson will teach students how to summarize the text as well as how to demonstrate their understanding of what they are reading.
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Materials:
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Paper
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Pencils
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Set of Apple articles
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Set of Making Cookies articles
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Summarization Checklist
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Procedures:
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Say, “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 is not 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.
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Say, “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.]
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Say, “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.”
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Say, “Next, we’re going to mark out anything that is not important or has been said more than once.”
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Say, “Finally, we need to find a way to organize our important information, including any details that support our main ideas.”
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Say, “Let us 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.”
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Say, “Now, I’m going to pass out our first article to read. It is about apples, which can be cooked into pies. Have any of you made an apple pie before? If so, who with and how was your experience? Before we read, I am going to point out a few important vocabulary words. The first is stem. The stem of an apple is the piece that sticks out the top of it. Another word is flesh. In the case of apples, the flesh is the inside part. [Pass out copies of the article to each student.]
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[Read the article out loud as the students follow along on their own copy.]
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Say, “Now, I’m going to show you how I would summarize this article.”
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Say, “To start, I’m going to pick out the most important details. The one thing I noticed was that it talked about each color having a different taste. So, I am going to make my topic sentence. ‘Apples taste different depending on what color they are.’” [Write the sentence down on the board.]
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Say, “Now let us pick out what is not important to the summary. The sentence ‘Some apples have leaves by the stems’ is not the most important part.”
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“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.]
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[Continue going through steps, thinking aloud so the students understand the process of deciding what is and is not important to the summary.]
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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.]
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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.
When do apples finish growing?
How many parts do an apple have?
What colors can an apple be?
What are Greg’s favorite cookies?
How long do the cookies take to bake?
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Resources:
Apple Article - https://www.k5learning.com/worksheets/reading-comprehension/1st-grade-1-reading-apples.pdf
Making Cookies - https://www.k5learning.com/sites/all/files/reading-comprehension-worksheet-grade-1-making-cookies.pdf
Adapted from Clarice Smith -https://cls0052.wixsite.com/eportfolio/reading-to-learn
