Rationale: Comprehension is a very important final step in a student’s reading development. When a student reads for comprehension, they are no longer spending time decoding words, instead, they are focused on understanding the message of the text. A great way to test a student’s comprehension is to get them to summarize a book they have read. In this lesson, students will practice summarization as a comprehension strategy. The students will summarize text by selecting important information and eliminating unnecessary details. Students will use the following summarization rules: detect and mark out unimportant or repeated information, find and highlight important information, and form a topic sentence from the important information. The teacher will model how students detect important information that is needed to write an effective summary.

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Materials

 

-       Pencil, marker, and highlighter for each student

-       Blank sheet of paper for each student

-       Copy of “How Do Fish… SWIM?” article for each student from Texas Parks &

Wildlife https://tpwd.texas.gov/kids/wild_things/fish/howdofishswim.phtml

-       White board

-       Projector

-       Comprehension Questions (written on board)

-       Assessment Checklist for each student (filled out by teacher)- attached at end of Lesson Design

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Procedures

 

1.     Say: “Have you ever read a really great book and wanted to tell someone about it, but you didn’t want to read them the entire book? What did you do instead?” (Allow for response). “You only told them the main ideas, or the most important parts, right? There is another word for when we do this; does anyone know what that word is?” (Allow for response). “It’s called summarization! Summarizing stories is extremely helpful when we don’t want to share a whole text, but rather just want to give someone a brief idea of what we read and learned. It can also help you as the reader to better understand what you have just read! Today, we will read an article about how fish are able to swim and practice giving summaries of our article.” (Hand out blank pieces of paper to each student). Say: “Everyone take out a marker. We’re going to write down the three rules of summarization on your paper. Turn your paper horizontally and draw one big circle in the middle. In the middle of this big circle I want you to write inside of it, ‘Three Rules of Summarization’ so that you will have them from now on to look back at.” (Demonstrate these steps while students do them so that they can see an example). “When you finish, please look at the board so that we can talk about the three rules together.” (Wait for all students to finish). “Ok, our first rule is ‘delete.’ Let’s draw one branch out from our big main circle and inside this circle write ‘Delete.’ As you will notice, we are making a visual aid friends, this is also called a spider web organization chart. These types of visual aids can help us see clearly what we are learning and also remember it better. What do we mean by ‘delete’?” (Allow for response). “When we summarize a text, we want to get rid of or ‘delete’ any information that is not important to our understanding of what we read. We must decide what is important and cross out anything that isn’t. Whenever you read a book, you will need to mentally ‘cross out’ anything that is not important, but today you can use your marker in the article! I will write out the steps on the board, but leave your charts blank for now so that you can use them when you read the article.” (Write explanation of the ‘delete’ step on the board). “The second rule of summarization is ‘substitute.’ Go ahead and draw a second line out from the middle circle and create another bubble. Inside this bubble we are going to write ‘Substitute’. What do we mean by substitute?” (Allow for response). “Once we get rid of anything unnecessary in the text and find what is important, we want to shorten the information we kept. We will substitute long parts with shorter versions of the same information. For example, if we had a sentence that talked about dogs, cats, and bunnies, how could we use just one word to shorten the sentence?” (Allow for response). “We could use the word pets, since dogs, cats, and bunnies are all pets that people own! By doing this, we gave a shorter summary but still kept the main idea of the sentence.” (Write explanation of ‘substitute’ on the board). “The final rule of summarization is ‘create.’ Let’s go ahead and draw our third and final line and bubble out from our main circle and write ‘Create’ inside of the circle. What does ‘create’ mean here? (Allow for response). “After we get rid of unimportant information and narrow down the important information, we must create main idea sentences. While we read our article today, we will create one main idea sentence for each paragraph we read.”

 

2. Say: “Before we jump into reading our article, let’s talk about what we already know about fish. Can anyone share something cool they know about fish?” (Allow for response, and record responses on the board). “Here’s a fact for you: fish are only able to live underwater because they cannot breathe in the open air. It would be impossible for a fish to live outside of the water because he wouldn’t be able to breathe or move around! How do you think fish move around under water, we know they swim, but how? Let’s read our article to find out!”

 

3. Say: “I will help you summarize the first paragraph, but you will do the rest by yourselves! First, let’s read the paragraph one time through to figure out what it’s about.” Fish swim by flexing their bodies and tail back and forth. Fish stretch or expand their muscles on one side of their body, while relaxing the muscles on the other side. This motion moves them forward through the water. (Read the first paragraph- in bold-out loud while showing it on the projector and have students follow along on their sheets). “Now that we have read the paragraph, we will follow our steps of summarization. First, let’s delete any information that is not important by crossing it out. Also, go ahead and highlight information that you know is important. ‘Fish swim by flexing their bodies and tail back and forth,’ that sounds like it could be important, right? Let’s highlight that sentence. However, we know that we are talking about fish, so we really don’t need to highlight that one word. Let’s look to the next sentence, ‘Fish stretch or expand their muscles on one side of their body, while relaxing the muscles on the other side’ Since we will learn about fish stretching and expanding their muscles later in the article, we only need to highlight that they relax muscles on one side. What should our main idea sentence be for this paragraph?” (Allow for response). “I’ll write our main idea sentence on the board: ‘Fish swim by moving their tails and by stretching and relaxing their muscles.’ Everyone copy this sentence into your ‘create’ bubble on your visual aid. Label it number one since it is the first paragraph. You will do the same for every other paragraph as well.”

 

4.     Say: “Before we read the article, we must go over some vocabulary words in the text that we might not know. What does the word ‘caudal’ mean?” (Allow for response). “caudal means ‘in the back, or on the back side.’ This is where a fish’s tail is!” (Write word and definition on the board for reference). “Do people use caudal fins to swim?” (Allow for response). “No, we don’t of course because we don’t have fins, what a silly trick question! But some animals, mostly animals that live underwater, will such as dolphins and sharks! So fill in the blank… All fish swim by moving their back fin, or tail, called the _____________ fin.” (Allow for response). “If you get stuck on another word, see if you can determine the meaning from the context, but if you still need help, raise your hand and I will come to you as soon as possible.”

 

 

5.     Say: “Now everyone read the article silently to themselves. Remember to cross off unimportant information, highlight important information, and create a main idea sentence for each paragraph. I will walk around to make sure everyone is doing alright. When you finish, turn in your bubble chart and article to me, and I will give you some questions to answer.” You all can do this, good luck!

 

6.     As each student turns in their work, hand them a comprehension question worksheet. Also, use the checklist attached below to assess the work each student turns in.

 

Comprehension Questions:

 

    1. Where do fish have to live in order to survive? (answer: water)

 

    2. What fin do fish use to push them through the water? (answer: caudal)

 

    3. Fish move their muscles in a ______ motion to swim. (answer: wave)

 

    4. How many types of fins do fish have? (answer: 5)

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Resources

 

“How Do Fish… SWIM” (Texas Parks & Wildlife Kids Article) https://tpwd.texas.gov/kids/wild_things/fish/howdofishswim.phtml

 

Rules for Summarization by Carol Hryniuk-Adamov, https://www.winnipegsd.ca/schools/Kelvin/StudentResources/khslibrary/Documents/Rules%20for%20Summarization.pdf

 

Summarizing in the Sea, Kathryn Gilley, http://kk31895.wixsite.com/kgilley0318/teaching-reading

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