Rationale: The goal of reading is to comprehend the text that is being read. Sometimes, we find that comprehension is a barrier during reading. Summarization is a strategy that can be used to allow students to take the important information from a passage and remember it for further use while not focusing on trivial information. The purpose of this lesson is to teach students how to summarize by asking themselves questions and remembering the important steps of summarization. 

 

Materials:

• Class set of the American Alligator article, including one for the teacher

• Lined Paper for students

• Pencils

• Summarization Rules Poster

• Assessment Checklist

 

Procedures:

1. Say: “Have you ever read a super cool book or article and wanted to tell your friends about it? Did you read them the whole thing or just tell them the important parts of it? Raise your hand to tell me! [call on student] That’s right! You only say the important parts of what you read. This is called summarizing. Summarization is a very helpful strategy good readers use to help comprehend or understand what they are reading. If you can summarize a book or article, it is a good sign that you are able to understand what you’ve read.”

2. Say: “Now, we are going to practice our summarizing skills with an article about the American Alligators. Alligators are very fast in the water and are green in color. Let’s read our article to find out some cool facts about alligators!”

3. Say: Before we read the article, it is important to know how to look at the vocabulary. Let’s look at a few words that we might not know what they mean. The words ferocious and vulnerable may be words that we do not know what they mean. Ferocious can mean fierce or violent. Vulnerable can mean easily injured or harmed. Let’s look at these words in their sentences. ‘As big and ferocious as the female alligator may look, she is a gentle mother.’ We can see that there is context in the sentence to give clues on what ferocious means. ‘Newly hatched young are only about six to eight inches long, and very vulnerable.’ We can see why these newborn baby alligators would be vulnerable because they are so much smaller than full-grown alligators.”

4. Say: “We have reviewed vocabulary that would be confusing and figured out their definitions. Let’s talk a little more about summarizing before we read our articles. There are three rules [point to poster with all the rules] ‘1. Delete unimportant information, 2. Find important information, 3. Write a topic sentence.’ The first rule means that if you’ve read something that is not important to the meaning or it is a repeated fact you can mentally delete it. The second rule means that if you see something you find important, ou should underline it or write down a key word or phrase from it. The third rule is a little trickier and we will practice it together in a moment, but it means that once you have found what the paragraph is about and what the main idea is, you combine them to create a topic sentence. This sentence expresses all the important parts of the text.”

5. Say: “We are going to practice summarizing as a class before I let you do it on your own. Let’s look at a paragraph in our article.”

 

“American alligators live in the wild in the southeastern United States. You're most likely to spot them in Florida and Louisiana, where they live in rivers, lakes, ponds, swamps, bayous, and marshes. These reptiles are kind of clumsy on land, but they're built for life in the water. Great swimmers, they are equipped with webbed feet and strong tails that propel them through the water.”

 

“What parts of this paragraph are important? I think the parts that say, ‘American alligators live in the wild in the southeastern United States.’ and ‘They’re built for life in water.’ I will underline those parts of the paragraph, but I will cross out the part about alligators being great swimmers since we already have a fact about them being built for water. Now, let’s put those sentences together to make a topic sentence.

 

“So now that we’ve applied rules 1 and 2 of summarizing to this paragraph, I’m going to demonstrate how to use rule 3 and create a topic sentence using the parts I underlined. “American alligators live in the southeastern United States and spend most of their time in the water.”

 

1. Say: “Let’s continue to pick out important points in each paragraph of the article. Find an umbrella term for the events that happen in the text. Now continue reading the article by yourself this time. Summarize as much as you can, highlighting important parts and marking through unimportant details. I’ll come around and check your work.”

2. Say: “Once you’ve read the whole article and find the main ideas and details highlighted, write down a one-paragraph brief summary on the article. At the bottom of your article, write five new words you have never seen before you read this article and write their definitions/what you think they mean based on the context within the article. Any questions?”

 

Assessment/ Comprehension Questions:

1. What makes the American Alligator American?

2. How are alligators such good swimmers?

3. What makes female alligators gentle?

4. How did American Alligators escape extinction?

 

Comprehension Checklist:

Did the students have a topic sentence for each paragraph?

Did students successfully delete unimportant information?

Did students successfully identify important information?

Did students use important information to make topic sentences?

 

References:

Murray, Bruce, Reading Genie, http://wp.auburn.edu/rdggenie/

 

American Alligator, Kids National Geographic, https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/animals/reptiles/american-alligator/

 

James, Emily, Sun Bears Love to Summarize, https://emjames77.wixsite.com/portfolio/reading-to-learn

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