Reading to Learn

Summarization Superstars!

Reading to Learn Design

Rationale: Comprehension is the final, and most important, step in a student’s reading development. If a student is reading for comprehension, they are no longer spending time decoding words, but now are focused on understanding the message of the text. A great way to test a student’s comprehension is to have them summarize a book that they have already read. In this lesson, students will practice summarization as a strategy of reading comprehension. The students will summarize text by only using important information from the text. Students will use the following summarization rules: mark out information that is not important or repeated, find and highlight important information, and form a topic sentence. The teacher will model how to detect important information that is needed to write a summary.

Materials:

Paper and pencil for each student
Highlighters for each student
Individuals copies of the article “Rescuing Leo the Snow Leopard” by National Geographic
Summarization checklist for each student (see below)
Assessment checklist (see below)
Comprehension quiz (see below)

Procedures:

“Raise your hand if you have ever read an article or a book and recommended it to a friend. Do you read them the whole book or do you just tell them the important parts of the book? Right! You only tell them the important parts of the story. When you only tell them the important parts of the story, this is called summarizing. Summarization is a very important strategy which good readers use to comprehend what they have read. If you are able to summarize a book, then it tells me that you understand what you have read!”
“Before we begin, I want to talk about some important words that we will see in the text that we are going to read. These words are: orphan and endangered. The first word we are going to go over is orphan. To be an orphan means the parents are gone and the animal is alone with no one to raise it. If a snow leopard is called an orphan, what does that mean? (Wait for the student’s answers). Now, I want you to pull out a piece of paper and use the word "orphan" in a sentence. The second word is endangered. Endangered means a species of animal is at risk of dying out, or becoming fewer in number, and eventually disappearing. For example, if I say cheetahs are endangered, what does that mean? (Wait for students to answer). Now I want you to use "endangered" in a sentence.”
“When we want to summarize a passage, we read only a little bit at a time. When we finish reading that small part, we look back and figure out what the most important parts are. We cross out ideas that are not important to the main idea. We must be very selective in choosing the most important information.“Now that we know what summarization is and why it is important, I am going to show you how to do it. To do this we will use an article called “Rescuing Leo the Snow Leopard. Do you think a baby snow leopard could survive without its parents? (See what the students have to say). We are now going to read an article to find out! Watch how I summarize the first two paragraphs in the article. (Hand each student a copy of the article). Remember that I only want the important parts! First I am going to read the entire first and second paragraph.

In 2005, a passing herder noticed a tiny snow leopard cub, helpless and alone on the mountainside. The cub's mother was gone, likely killed by a hunter in the steep mountains of Pakistan.

The man decided to take the orphan home and raise it. But after a week, the herder realized the snow leopard baby wasn't healthy and that he didn't know how to feed it. The World Wide Fund for Nature-Pakistan (WWF-P) heard about the cub and sent a staffer to the herder’s remote village. The situation was more urgent than just one animal in danger; snow leopards are an endangered species.

These two paragraphs give us some great information! I am going to use a highlighter to highlight the important parts. The first paragraph says that a herder noticed a snow leopard that was alone. I am going to highlight “A passing herder noticed a tiny snow leopard cub, helpless and alone on the mountainside” because the entire article is about the snow leopard. I am then going to use my pencil to mark out the rest of the paragraph because it doesn’t have any important information.

In the next paragraph I am going to highlight “The man decided to take the orphan home and raise it” because this is important information. I will use my pencil to mark out the next two sentences and then highlight “The situation was more urgent than just one animal in danger; snow leopards are an endangered species” because we need to know this information.”

4. “Now that you have a good idea of how to summarize, let’s summarize the next paragraph together.

In addition to being hunted for their beautiful, thick coats, the wild cats have lost much of their natural prey, such as wild mountain goats and sheep, to hunters. That has forced the normally reclusive cats to hunt livestock, which can get them shot by angry herders. The world population of snow leopards in their natural range—high mountains in Central Asia—has dropped to between 3,500 and 7,500. In Pakistan only about 200 to 420 are left. The people at the WWF-P didn't want to lose another.

Let’s underline the most important parts of this paragraph. Do you think what livestock the snow leopard eats is important? (Listen to the answers students give). No, I don’t think it is either. (Allow students time to discuss with their partners what they believe the important parts are.”

5. “Now that I have modeled for you and we have done it together, you are going to continue to work on summarizing on your own. I want you to read the rest of the article and highlight the important parts. Once you have finished, come to the front and get a Summary Checklist from me. This will help you write a summary of the article using the highlighted information. Do not worry if it looks short. The point of a summary is so that you get a short version of an article. Once you have finished, I want you to share your summary with a neighbor. If there are any differences between you and your neighbor’s summaries, I want you to discuss them.”

Summary Checklist:

Did I…..

____ write my topic sentence?

____ find supporting details to help answer the question?

____ remove unimportant information by marking it out?

____ remove repeated ideas?

____ create a 3-5 sentence summary?

Assessment Materials:

Comprehension Quiz:

Name: _____________

What happened to the snow leopard cub’s mother?

What did the man do with the orphan snow leopard?

Why did they choose to send the cub to a national park instead of releasing to back to the wild?

What happened after Leo got back to the Bronx zoo?

Assessment Checklist:

Did the student…..

_____Collected important information

_____ Ignored trivia and examples in summary

_____ Significantly reduced the text from the original

_____ Sentences brought ideas together from each paragraph

_____ Sentences organized coherently into essay form

References:

“Rescuing Leo the Snow Leopard.” National Geographic Kids. National Geographic, n.d.

https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/explore/nature/snow-leopard-rescue/#snow-leopard-rescue-1.jpg

Susanna Fields, Superstar Summarization:

http://susannafields95.wixsite.com/literacylessons/reading-to-learn

Sydney Hall, Swimming into Summarization:

http://slh0043.wixsite.com/misshallswebsite/reading-to-learn

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