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Reading to Learn Design

 

Anna Sienkiewicz

 

Rationale: It is important that students begin to comprehend while reading. During this lesson, students will learn how to summarize! Summarization reveals whether or not a student has fully grasped the content of the reading he/she was given. Students should not be focused on decoding at this point but should be developed into fluent readers. The students will learn how to summarize a text by selecting important information and eliminating unnecessary details. They will use the following summarization rules: detect and mark out unimportant or repeated information, find and highlight important information, superordinate predicate terms, and form a topic sentence from the important information. The teacher will model how to detect important information that is needed to write an effective summary.

 

Materials:

• Paper for each student

• Pencils for each student

• Highlighters for each student

• Copied sets of "The First Airplane" from Celebrating Chemistry. American Chemical Society (2003). (Make sure they are copied pages so students can mark them up!)

• Smartboard or whiteboard and writing utensil for teacher to use for modeling

• Poster of summarizing rules:

1. Detect and mark out unimportant or repeated information

2. Find and highlight important information

3. Superordinate predicate terms (find an "umbrella term"for the events that happen in the text)

4. Form a topic sentence from the important information

• Assessment checklist

• Written assessment

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Procedures:

1. Say: “Have you ever had a book that you thought was really interesting and told your friends about it? Did you tell them every detail about the book, or did you only tell them the important parts? [Wait for students to give responses.] Right, you only told them the important parts! Without even knowing it, you were practicing something called summarization! Summarizing is a skill that can help us to better understand the books we read, making us better readers. If you can summarize a book or an article, then that helps me know that you understand what you have read!

2. Say: “When using summarization skills, we have a few guidelines to follow. [Hold up poster with summarizing rules and hang in the front of the classroom.] First, we need to get rid of any unimportant information in the text. To do that, we read through the entire article, and then we delete any information that is not important or repeated somewhere else in the text. Then, we highlight, underline, or circle the things that are important to us. Finally, we take all of those important parts of the article or story and create a topic sentence to begin our summary.

3. Say: “A really good way to summarize and create topic sentences is to find an “umbrella term” that all of the ideas in a passage can fall under. An example of this would be if I were reading a passage that told me about different types of fish, sharks, and jellyfish that live in the ocean, my umbrella term could be “sea creatures.” I picked this term because fish, sharks, and jellyfish are all sea creatures, and that is what the passage is about!

4. Say: “Before we continue with our book, we are going to go over a few vocabulary words!  We have learned that an engineer is someone who applies scientific knowledge to practical problems. You could say, "The engineer who made this plane is very smart." Which of these could be an engineer? A mailman, a train conductor, or a banker? [Call on student.] That's right! A train conductor could be an engineer because he probably has to use scientific knowledge to solve practical problems on his train. Yesterday we also talked about engines. We said that an engine is a machine with moving parts that changes power into motion. You could say, "The engine in my car died so the car quit moving." Which one of these would not have an engine? An airplane, a school bus, or a bicycle? [Call on student.] That's right! A bicycle does not have an engine because you use your legs to make the bicycle move instead of using an engine.

5. Pass out copies of "The First Airplane," and display a copy on the overhead projector. Say: “Now we're going to practice summarizing as a class. Just from looking at this book, what do you think the story will be about? What do you think will happen while the first airplane is being built? We get to learn all about who invented the airplane and how they achieved success! Let's look at the first paragraph of our article:
   At 10:35 a.m. on December 17, 1903, two brothers from Ohio flew the first successful airplane for 12 seconds and 120 feet along a beach in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Taking turns as pilot, they flew three more times that day. Each time they flew farther. On their fourth try, they managed to go 852 feet in 59 seconds--an amazing feat at the time. The two brothers had invented powered flight.
   
   
   
   I want everyone to be following along with me and paying attention to how I follow these rules. Let's look at the first sentence: At 10:35 a.m. on December 17, 1903. Do you think it's important to know the date? [Discuss.] Sometimes it is important to know the dates of things, but for the purpose of just understanding the main points of this article we don't really need to know the date. [Mark through the date.] Let's keep reading: two brothers from Ohio flew the first successful airplane for 12 seconds and 120 feet along a beach in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. What parts of this sentence are important for my understanding? I think the part about two brothers might be important so I'm going to highlight it. From Ohio.. I'll mark through that because I don't think I really need to know that they're from Ohio. Flew the first successful airplane. Oh I bet that part is important! I'll highlight it. For 12 seconds and 120 feet along a beach in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. I think it may be important that they were in North Carolina so I'll highlight that. Taking turns as pilot, they flew three more times that day. Each time they flew farther. On their fourth try, they managed to go 852 feet in 59 seconds--an amazing feat at the time. Since it says it's an amazing feat, I'll highlight that they flew for 59 seconds. The two brothers had invented powered flight. I think I'll highlight that because it definitely seems important.

6. Say: “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 highlighted. I've got two brothers, flew the first successful airplane, North Carolina, 59 seconds, two brothers invented powered flight. Now I need to make this into a sentence that makes sense. Since I have two brothers already highlighted, I'll mark through the first one. And now I've got: Two brothers flew the first successful airplane in North Carolina for 59 seconds. Now the only part left in that last phrase that isn't repeated is the part about it being a powered flight. So I'll change my topic sentence to: Two brothers flew the first successful powered airplane in North Carolina for 59 seconds.
   Does everyone understand what I just did? Does anyone have any questions?”

7. Say: “Now I'm going to let you all practice summarizing with the rest of this article. I want you to go through each paragraph and break it down like we just did. Be sure to follow the rules for summary and then change the order around in your topic sentence if necessary so that it makes sense. I want you to write a topic sentence for each paragraph in the article. You may just copy the sentence that I wrote for paragraph one, and then you will write four more topic sentences of your own. When you are finished, staple your article to your paper with the topic sentences and turn it in.”

 

Assessment: Assessment: I will review each student's topic sentences as well as the markings on each of their articles. I will use the assessment checklist for each student listed above to know whether each student followed the rules and understood how to summarize accordingly. Their sentences for each paragraph may vary slightly, but a good topic sentence for the second paragraph might be: Orville and Wilbur Wright never learned about engineering, but they learned how gears and pulleys worked from working on bicycles in their shop. I will also give them a written assessment to test their reading comprehension.

 

Written Assessment:

 

1. What kind of shop did the Wright brothers own?

2. What kind of machines did they study before building their plane?

3. Why was it important for the Wright brothers to know how to repair bicycles?

4. What is the difference between a glider and plane?

5. Why was adding an engine to their plane difficult?

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References:

Brown, Caitlin. “Stomping into Summarization”

https://caitlinbb.weebly.com/reading-to-learning-design.html

 

Deason, Morgan Grace. “Soaring Into Summarizing!”

http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/reading_genie/awakenings/deasonmrl.htm

 

"The First Airplane" from Celebrating Chemistry. American Chemical Society, 2003.
https://www.acs.org/content/dam/acsorg/education/outreach/2003-earths-atmosphere-and-beyon.pdf?_ga=2.147750519.1190910969.1542118954-1792186018.1542118954

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